Repartioning after dual boot W2k crashed?

[rloc]

Problem:

I had a dual boot Mandrake9 / Win2k installation runnning very happily until the Win2k got hit by a virus. (This was my fault entirely btw). I have now removed the W2k system from the drive but I would like to re-partition the drive to run Mandrake only.

Can I simply partition the old W2k space to be an ext2 partition without affecting the data on the existing Linux partitions or should I consider a complete re-install of Linux?

Thanks for your help

Robert

[deathadder]

If you really wanted to you could completly repartition and then install mandrake, but you can also create a partition from the windows space, format it with the filesystem of your choice and edit your /etc/fstab so it mounts on boot, if you wanted or you could always mount it yourself, the only problem could be the boot loader if that was installed on the mbr, if windows was the first partition crashing that will mean no more boot loader, however mandrake will let you reinstall the boot loader, from the first cd you will have to choose the rescue option to do it.

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by rloc

Can I simply partition the old W2k space to be an ext2 partition without affecting the data on the existing Linux partitions or should I consider a complete re-install of Linux?


Use the Linux fdisk to first remove the Windows partition, recreate a Linux partition again with fdisk and then format using whatever filesystem type you choose.

/sbin/mkfs.ext2 /dev/hda#
/sbin/mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda#
/sbin/mkfs.jfs /dev/hda#
/sbin/mkfs.reiserfs /dev/hda#
/sbin/mkfs.xfs /dev/hda#

Change '#' to the correct partition number.