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gnac
Guru
Joined: 30 Jun 2003
Posts: 302
Location: Columbia River Gorge
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 Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 7:01 pm Post subject: removing windows once and for all |
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I currently a have several windows (NTFS/FAT) partitions that I would like to remove to free up space (and get rid of my win2k installation in the process). The system is set up to boot to the windows boot partition on /dev/hda1. The Windows boot loader defaults to load the linux installation on hda5 per the instructions given at this link: How to install Gentoo in a Win XP/NT configuration
I would like to remove the windows partitions on /dev/hda[1,9,10]. | Code: | Device Boot Id System
/dev/hda1 * 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda7 83 Linux
/dev/hda8 83 Linux
/dev/hda9 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda10 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda11 83 Linux |
In addition I would like to resize the remaining partitions. The only partitions I care about are hda5 (boot) and hda11(80 gigs of misc data).
This will of course mean either reconfiguring my system to use the current /dev/hda5 as the bootable partition or resizing all of the partions to let hda1 be a 100 meg boot partition and alowing hda8 to take of the remainder of the extended partition (hda2), or perhaps allow a third partition to take up any remaining space.
If I simply change hda5 via fdisk to be the bootable partition, will that allow the system to boot right to linux.=, or will I need to re-grub the system?
I would really prefer to reconfigure the entire partition table but that opens up a whole 'nother can of worms that I'm not sure I want to deal with right now.
Any hints or suggestions? Thanks.
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"I thought she'd steal my heart, instead she stole my kidney,
and now its for sale, on the black market in Sydney" - Better Abraham |
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Tii
l33t
Joined: 02 Jan 2004
Posts: 733
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 7:11 pm Post subject: |
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| What ever you do remember to back up everything. I learned it the hard way today. |
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NeddySeagoon
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Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54218
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 7:17 pm Post subject: |
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gnac,
You need to reinstall grub on the Master Boot Record (MBR) and update grub.conf accordingly. At the moment, You have grub installed either on /boot or on / depending on your partitioning scheme.
Do back everything up before you start.
============edit=================
Rather than mess with the partition sizes I would move things around. Put /usr /home /var and maybe /tmp on their own partitions. Its a lot safer.
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Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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thepi
Guru
Joined: 06 Jan 2004
Posts: 352
Location: Tokyo, Japan
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 7:29 pm Post subject: |
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hi,
| gnac wrote: | | If I simply change hda5 via fdisk to be the bootable partition, |
i don't think you can make an extended partition bootable.
i think what you want is to have an own bootloader (grub, lilo) to start up windows. you can't trash windows whilst keeping the boot config you have, as the windows bootloader (and its configuration files) will vanish once you delete the windows partition. shouldn't be a problem tho, the gentoo install manual helps on this topic 
in either way, the bootsector (where grub/lilo is located, or whatever bootloader) is supposed to be in the very first sectors of a disk. this has to do with the way a bios handles the boot process, kinda goes back to the at/xt-systems with ~20meg hdd's  (waaay before linux)
so i'd suggest you just install grub/lilo/whatever (see manual), and then you could either erase the old partitions & make it your new root (there was a tutorial how to move a gentoo system without trashing it, search). or, you could use partition magic. if you want to resize the partitions, that's the way to go.
on the other hand, you know you can mount a partition below _any_ (empty) directory, do you? for example you could make one of the newly created partitions your new /home dir (mount it somewhere else first & copy the data, then mount it at /home). or whatever.
warning: the amount of data that can be saved in that directory is limited to the size of the disk/partition you mounted there. 3gig partition on /home = can save 3gig of data in /home. fair enough.
okay this shall not become a howto, there have been plenty of similar postings, and some decent howtos can be found somewhere here. just search for it 
edit: grr i knew it always takes me too long to answer a posting 
regards
pi~
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Installing Gentoo
