Re: Help me delete win 95 partition

From: Styvaen (abuse_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 01/27/04 

Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 03:13:10 +0000

Carl wrote:

> I've got a dual boot system. i put RH 7.3 on a dell that already had
> win 95 installed but on a separate drive. is there a way to reclaim
> the drive that win 95 is on for linux? What commands would i use. do
> i need to worry about hosing the mbr since win95 was on there first?
>

No problems with hosing. The following method is an example of how you can
use a second hard drive later on to make more room. It assumes linux is
on /dev/hdb. It also assumes that /dev/hda is a suitable size for your
home directories.

  --------------------------------------------------------------------

Assuming the windows 95 drive is your primary master from a console you
would type:

# cfdisk /dev/hda

It's a fairly straight forward partitioner. Make a linux partition on
there. Lets suppose that it is /dev/hda1

Then you can add a filesystem

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1

Then you can

# mkdir /mnt/spare
# mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/spare

If all went well you should get a message about what the filesystem is
on /mnt/spare

You now have spare space where you can copy the contents of your home
directory. Make sure you log out of all your user accounts now including
xfree then type:

# cp -a /home /mnt/spare

The next step is dangerous as it wipes out your old home directory check
that last copy went OK.

# rm -dr /home

This makes a directory link to the new location

# ln -s /mnt/spare/home /home

Next you edit your /etc/fstab file so you don't have to manually mount spare
each time you boot.

Add something like this:
/dev/hda1 /mnt/spare ext3 defaults 0 0

The end.

  -------------------------------------------------------------------

For those who say why don't you just mount the /dev/hda1 partition
onto /home the reason is you can't add other directories later on.

Apologies in advance for any errors.

Styvaen.

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