Bastardised hard drives

[Brynn]

Had a urge last night to get off my ass and get my dual booting linux and windows. Was going smoothly - well till linux was installed. Then i stuck the windows xp cd in the drive, changed the bios to boot off the cd - then got to the "press any key to boot off the cd" then it said "setup are determining your hardware profile" then the cd drive blinked - then the HD light just stayed on permenently for about an hour without doing fuck all. Plugging both my linus drives in, trying to get to format one of them doesn't work - says i have a corrupted kernel. I have tried installing the windows on both my drives but neither work - they both just give the same error.
I have also tried to re-install linux creating partitions using disk druid - but that fucks up - gives me the nice error saying "could not create partition".

Anyone got any advice?

 

[Dr_Weasel]

I thought if you wanted a dual boot system you had to put Windows on first? Otherwise the windows install corrupts the MBR...

 

[Brynn]

according to this
you do linux first.

main question i think i am asking is is their anyway to format a drive manually?

 

[Dr_Weasel]

Ahh, I knew it had to be a particular way around

As to formatting, the easiest way I can think of is to boot with a win98 boot disk (Get the Win 98 SE OEM from here if you dont have one) and Fdisk and Format the bugger.

 

[TdC]

that will only work if you use a floppy to boot from as directed. tbh if I dual-boot (*spits*), then I install the unixalike last as windows tends to faff about to much for my liking. and besides windows tends to kill things like bootmanagers (if not it's own).

advice? write out a new master boot record. boot off a floppy with a unix or doze bootdisk and do it. for doze it's fdisk /mbr and for linux et all it can differ depending on the tool you're using.

 

[babs]

Other advantage of putting windows on first is that windows doesn't like being installed past the nth sector (cba to google and find out which), whereas linux iirc doesn't care.

 

[sibanac]

according to this
you do linux first.

main question i think i am asking is is their anyway to format a drive manually?

Brynn thats some wierd macho way of doing it, prob needed if you want to install 3 versions of windows, but if you want to do a simple windows/linux dual boot its as easy as 1 2 3.

1) install windows
2) install linux
3) all works

 

[Brynn]

The main problem i have now - i have 2 copies of linux - and *no* windows, as in on installing *nix i deleted my windows crap. I cant even boot into windows as there is no windows directory. I need to format my 2 linux drives, if anyone is in aberdeen university just now i have one with me and could do with some help

 

[Escape]

Slip in a win98 bootup disk...

fdisk /mbr (like said above, on both hard drives)
use fdisk to wipe all of the partitions and then make new ones*
reboot with the floppy, and format those partitions
install windows
install linux


* When you make partitions, make 2 for windows on the first disk(imo it's always good to have a 2nd Windows installation, incase the first one becomes corrupt, you can still boot into windows and retrieve any unsaved work). Make other partitions for apps/games/whatever. Now you can either have Linux installed on the first disk, or the second. Whatever you choose, make only one partition for Linux(you can split your second disk into half for linux and half for FAT32(it's a good idea to have at least one FAT32 partition somewhere, to share files between windows/linux).

Where ever you want to put Linux, you only need one partition for it now, because during the Linux installation, you will split that single partition and format it into new Linux partitions.

Sounds like you don't have any data on the disks to lose, so just go for it and if something goes wrong, just format the disks and start again

 

[Ardrias]

You could try using the tools found on The Ultimate Bootcd
Some of them are bound to help you

 

[Brynn]

Im not doing linux anymore - caused me too much problems. The only reason i wanted linux anyway was for the funky screensavers

 

[Escape]

chicken

<ignores his untouched linux installation>

My problem is finding something to do in linux. I guess it's ok for coding and other geeky stuff... oO

 

[old.user4556]

Linux makes me sick.

 

[Brynn]

exactly all you can do in linux on 64bit is compile C programs twice as fast.


thats it

 

[TdC]

you can also faff about and give up as soon as you do something wrong, but that's another story

 

[Brynn]

thats meeee

downloading the 3 gig Suse Dvd iso at hom just now. Might give that a try later