On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 10:36:45AM +1200, cr wrote: > On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 04:01, dougpol1@adelphia.net wrote: > > Hello all, > > I had a dual boot system with Windows and Linux > > installed. Bought a new cd writer and found out I had to > > upgrade win 98 to SE to use new software for writer. SE > > costs more than the writer did. Nuts to microsoft. > > Took Windows out and installed Debian Sarge with > > the new installer. I really am happy with it. > > My question is How do I reformat my second hard > > drive that is presently Fat 32 windows so that Linux can > > use it for backup. I tried cfdisk but linux cannot see the > > drive. I have a Maxtor cd for the drive, which is Maxtor, > > but there is no Linux formating available on it. I sent > > them an e-mail asking why not. > > Thanks in advance for any help. > > Doug > > That's very odd. fdisk or cfdisk can usually see a FAT drive (I've been > messing around with multiple hard drives for yonks and never had a problem > with 'seeing' them). Sorry to ask this but you are giving cfdisk the right > address (as in "cfdisk /dev/hdb") I suppose? Umm, if you swapped drives > around I suppose you did the right things with the drive select jumpers? > (sorry to mention that but these things happen....) Doubt that's it, his dmesg output shows both drives being recognised. > I've never found the make of drive to make any difference, and I've used > Maxtor, Seagate, Fujitsu, Quantum, Western Digital... so I'm not sure what > the Maxtor CD would have on it other than fairly generic formatting tools. > > I believe it's usually recommended to remove partitions using the software > that created them - that is, using Windows FDISK to remove the partitions on > the drive; then Linux fdisk/cfdisk to create new (and, I think, mke2fs to > format them). Whether your old W98 CD (if you have one) will allow you to > run FDISK without installing Windows, I have no idea. (Nor do I know > whether W98 will even contemplate addressing anything other than the > first-and-only partition in the machine :) Generally you *create* partitions with software for the OS that's going to use them, which means that setting up a dual-boot system involves using FDISK first and cfdisk second because cfdisk is intelligent enough not to trash FDISK's partitions but not vice versa. Deleting partitions isn't a problem. If you really want to make sure, use dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=512 count=1 to nuke the partition table. What exactly is the output when you run cfdisk /dev/hdb ? -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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