10/27/2002 13:31, Cleve Allison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >OK....heres the deal. >I took my 100GB harddrive and installed WinXP, partitioning 9GB for the >boot partition and later after it was fully installed, I created a 1 GB >partition to be used for the swap file. > >Then I installed Mandrake 9.0 and created 60GB vfat partition so that I >could acceess files from either Windows or Linux. > >I allowed Mandrake to partition the rest of the drive into / , /usr , >/home , and swap partitions. Three of them are ext3 and the swap >partition is formatted however swap partitions are formatted. > >All good and simple except WinXP started really flaking out >sooooooo.....
Well, I would argue that WinXP would start flaking out regardless of installing Linux. :) >Since I don't know any other way to do it, I trashed the whole thing and >started over. Removing the partitions with Delpart and doing an fdisk >/mbr to clean out the master boot record. > >Well this didn't remove the Linux stuff. > >I installed WinXP again but it wouldn't complete the final stage in >which it saves the settings.....I assume that this is when the mbr >record is saved. Tried it again and again. Finally I found the Win2K >would install, so I did that. Then I installed Mandrake. >It all works but now Lilo has an entry for not only Linux and NT but >also for old_NT and old_Linux....this is how I figured out that I didn't >really clean up the drive from the previous installations. > >In the Windows world, Delpart and fdisk /mbr pretty much cleans up >everything. >How do I start from a clean slate with Linux? You are very close. The UNIX program "fdisk" is what you are looking for. You should really read up on Linux partitions and fdisk. Start here: http://rute.2038bug.com/node22.html.gz. If this link doesn't work for you, see http://rute.sf.net and look at "19. Partitions, File Systems, Formatting, Mounting". You should also check out Tom's Root/Book disk, which is a bootable Linux system on a floppy disk with all kinds of neat tools like fdisk, etc. See http://www.toms.net/rb. -- John Hebert
