Red Hat Topics - formatting

Author

formatting

Patrick4Sensi

2004-10-26, 2:45 am

I need help formatting my hard drive. The only OS i have on here is
Linux and I can't boot my XP cd. I think Linux is interferring with
the boot process, so I'm tryin to format my hd and install XP first.
The problem is, I don't know how to format this thing inside the Linux
environment, I know I need to be outside of the OS to format, but how
do I get to a command line outside of Linux? Or maybe someone else
can give me another idea. Thanks

Jean-David Beyer

2004-10-26, 7:45 am

Patrick4Sensi wrote:
> I need help formatting my hard drive. The only OS i have on here is
> Linux and I can't boot my XP cd. I think Linux is interferring with
> the boot process, so I'm tryin to format my hd and install XP first.
> The problem is, I don't know how to format this thing inside the Linux
> environment, I know I need to be outside of the OS to format, but how
> do I get to a command line outside of Linux? Or maybe someone else
> can give me another idea. Thanks

You should not need to format it. I installed XP on a machine recently and
I did format it so that XP would not take over the whole 3 hard drives. I
used http://www.toms.net/rb/ which I have burned onto a CD-ROM, and ran
fdisk to do it. Actually, I formatted 4 "partitions" onto the /dev/hda
drive and left /dev/sda and /dev/sdb alone because I knew when I installed
Linux that the Red Hat Disk Druid would format those for me.

But if you are reporting correctly and the CD will not even boot, you have
other problems. You might check your BIOS settings. Normally, the boot
order should be:

Floppy
CD-ROM
Hard Drive

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ Registered Machine 241939.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 08:20:00 up 3 days, 10:12, 4 users, load average: 4.17, 4.24, 4.19

Jeffrey N. Alsip

2004-10-28, 5:45 pm

patrick4sensi@charter.net (Patrick4Sensi) wrote in message news:<755abc7a.0410251924.17cf0f1a@posting.google.com>...
> I need help formatting my hard drive. The only OS i have on here is
> Linux and I can't boot my XP cd. I think Linux is interferring with
> the boot process, so I'm tryin to format my hd and install XP first.
> The problem is, I don't know how to format this thing inside the Linux
> environment, I know I need to be outside of the OS to format, but how
> do I get to a command line outside of Linux? Or maybe someone else
> can give me another idea. Thanks

If you are talking about not being able to boot to your XP
Installation CD, then you have a BIOS problem. Enter your BIOS and
change youy "boot device priority" to A:/CDROM/C:

Chris Cole

2004-10-29, 5:45 pm

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 20:24:15 -0700, Patrick4Sensi wrote:

> I need help formatting my hard drive. The only OS i have on here is
> Linux and I can't boot my XP cd. I think Linux is interferring with
> the boot process, so I'm tryin to format my hd and install XP first.
> The problem is, I don't know how to format this thing inside the Linux
> environment, I know I need to be outside of the OS to format, but how
> do I get to a command line outside of Linux? Or maybe someone else
> can give me another idea. Thanks

Firstly, why are you ruining your PC by installing XP? ;-)

I think you've got two questions here.
Q1)How to format the HD that linux is
residing on?
Q2)Why can't I boot my XP CD?

A1) You need to boot linux from a boot disk (floppy or CD) so that you can
format the root partition (if this is what you want to do). The
installation disk is usually enough or you could from knoppix et al.
Although you probalby want to run fdisk first to create the apropriate
number of partitions.
A2) This isn't a linux problem. Check your BIOS to see what the boot order
is. If HD is before CD you need to reverse it.

A bit more info could be useful. What's the partition layout of you HD(s)?
What distro are you using and version?
HTH
Chris.