Topic: removal of e-smith

[Ian]

i installed esmith on a second machine and now i'm trying to reclaim the old server cause its more powerful than the new one and has more disk space.. problem is fdisk won't work..."cannot delete ext parts while logical drive exists"... but there is no logical drive to delete. i've tried restoring the fdisk /mbr and i even went as far as doing a low lvl format from the bios and still no luck. i found posts with a command line "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda" which is supposed to restore hd to factory blank but it fails from a: on a win boot disk and on c: i'm really at my wits end .. help

[Ed Form]

Ian wrote:
>
> i installed esmith on a second machine and now i'm trying to
> reclaim the old server cause its more powerful than the new
> one and has more disk space.. problem is fdisk won't
> work..."cannot delete ext parts while logical drive
> exists"... but there is no logical drive to delete. i've
> tried restoring the fdisk /mbr and i even went as far as
> doing a low lvl format from the bios and still no luck. i
> found posts with a command line "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda"
> which is supposed to restore hd to factory blank but it fails
> from a: on a win boot disk and on c: i'm really at my wits
> end .. help

Try booting the machine with a Windows 2000 professional CD and use the delete partition functions near the beginning of the installation routine. I've never come across a disk it couldn't empty.

Ed Form

[Andy Parkinson]

Try using Ranish Partion Manager. It will get rid of anything and is a free utility. Download it from http://www.ranish.com/part/  .

It creates a bootable diskette and boots straight into itself without using dos or anything. Takes a bit of getting used to but is well worth it.

[Anthony Otley]

the windows fdisk can only remove non-dos primary partitions. E-smith and some other linux distributions create a small primary partition for the boot partition then an extended partition with ext2 and swap logical partitions within it. Windows fdisk chokes on detecting the non-dos logical partitions so can't delete them. Hence you can't delete the extended partition, hence the first primary partition. You need to use a linux fdisk or something like partition manager. I usually run a Suse install disk, choose a custom partitioning and delete all the partitions then exit the installation when I have wiped the drive.
Tony

[Ian]

Thanks all.. got a direct mailing with advice on a shareware .exe called delpart.. it blew away the nasty linux partitions so now i got a win os back up. thanks again

[Graham]

Nasty Linux Partitions ???????

Takes all sorts . . . .