How to get rid of Windows?

[IllegalOperatio]

My wifes machine is a dual boot, a 10 gig hard drive partitioned 5 gigs to XP and 5 gigs to Redhat 8.0.

Grub is installed on the MBR HDA1.

She loves Linux and never uses XP anymore at all. She is also out of room on her Linux partition so she wants me to get rid of XP all together and turn that part of her hard drive into open space for Linux.

The problem is, she has alot of stuff on Redhat now and doesnt want to reformat and start over. I really fear attempting this on my own without some sort of guidence, I just dont have a good feeling that I can achieve it with good results.

What would be the best way to do this?

Here is the FDISK info


Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1240 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 638 5124703+ b Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda2 639 651 104422+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 652 938 2305327+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 939 1240 2425815 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 939 1043 843381 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 1044 1108 522081 83 Linux
/dev/hda7 1109 1187 634536 83 Linux
/dev/hda8 1188 1240 425691 82 Linux swap

[f76]

my humble responce:
Copy all the stuff on a borrowed HD and then try the tricks. or backup all that u can on CD-r/CD-rw and reinstall.

But then you dont have to play it safe :)

[DNL]

I have two additional ways you can consider beside backup and reinstall ...

1- reformat the XP partition as a Linux partition. You can mount it under an existing directory and both partitions will appear seemlessly as one big space.

2- backup the Linux partition and then use a program like Partition Magic or Partiton Commander to delete the XP partition and resize the Linux partition. A backup is strongly advised because the repartitioning operations do sometimes fail.

Good luck.

[wapcaplet]

A clean install would be great, I'm sure (definitely the cleanest way to do it and organize your partitions), but probably the best thing to do is just reformat your Windows partitions as native Linux, and then configure them (using your /etc/fstab) to be mounted somewhere convenient, where you would like to have the new space.

I think you may be able to just run mke2fs on the partitions you want to convert, like:

mke2fs /dev/hda4

(Not having a Windows partition anymore, I can't verify this - you may need to use fdisk to convert it to Linux native. Anyone else know?)

Obviously, backup anything you might need off the Windows partition(s) first :) But once you have it formatted as ext2, edit your /etc/fstab to have it mounted when you boot, and you oughta be good to go.

The /dev/hda1 partition might be trickier, but if the only Linux-related thing on there is your boot info (Grub), it should be no problem to reformat that one as well, and then re-run Grub to install the boot stuff back on it. You could have it mounted as /boot/ if you don't have one already.

Now, if only my wife liked Linux as much as yours does ;)

[Thorin]

You use fdisk to delete the partition, or disk druid which I think comes with RH. Much simpler, and wont damage any other device if you do it right.