Need Partition Help

[caribsoul]

Explanation of situation: Have an old computer lying around, Pentium 233, 64 Mb RAM, with two different video cards I can put in it: Matrox Millenium 4 Mb and Intergraph Intense 3D 100 with Rendition Verite 1000 chipset. I've tried installing both Red Hat 6.1 and Mandrake 9.0 on it. With Red Hat 6.1, I could never get it to boot up with either KDE or Gnome GUI or start either from the command line. With Mandrake, it installs fine, recognizes all my hardware, but when it reboots all i get is colored lines across the screen. When I run XFdrake I can't find a resolution that works. Changed to the Matrox Millenium card and XFdrake stops after I select my monitor....doesn't let me select a video card.

The end result is I give up trying to install Linux on this machine. Apparently this machine is too old and I don't have the drivers I need to install Linux properly, nor the knowledge to find and instal the right drivers, if they exist. It's not worth the trouble, though I'd love to use the machine to learn to use Linux.

My problem is, I want to install Windows 98 on it and give it to my son so he can use it for a word processor and now its got Linux partitions on both drives and both Windows 98 fdisk and DOS 6.2 fdisk won't take them off. How do I clean the Linux partitions off the hard drives so I can install Windows again? Fdisk says I can't eliminate the logical drives off the drives, yet the locical drives don't show, yet a considerable amount of space is being used by partitions that I can't see.

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

[Bokkenka]

Reboot either RedHat / Mandrake installer. When you get to the part where you partitioned the drive, delete the partitions, save the changes, and shut the computer off. Boot up the Win 98 disk and install.

[mrpurple]

Another solution is downloading MAXBLAST from maxtor.com.

It will create a bootable floppy disk with a nice GUI hard drive pationtion manager. This will delete ANY partitions or even write zeros to the drive (low level format) and you can repartition as needed.

Yet another solution is to buy a 32mb nvidia TNT2 (agp or pci) card from newegg.com. They have them there for $26.00 and free shipping (last time I checked).

Not the best of graphics cards but certainly not the worst but the drivers are included in most linux distros (and if you haven't tried Red Hat 8.0, I love it).