remove partaion

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Sat, 2 Sep 2006, Aaron Konstam wrote:

> On Sat, 2006-09-02 at 12:44 +0530, yogesh at banasdairy.coop wrote:
>> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>> /dev/hda2             7.7G  5.0G  2.4G  68% /
>> /dev/hda5              15G  331M   14G   3% /backup
>> /dev/hda1             388M   13M  355M   4% /boot
>> /dev/hda6              14G   11G  2.3G  83% /data
>> none                  121M     0  121M   0% /dev/shm
>>
>>
>> hi to all
>>  i have a partation type as discueed above
>> i want to delete/remove
>>
>> /dev/hda5              15G  331M   14G   3% /backup
>>  this partation and want to install windows 2000 on that partation
>> so can u give me help how can i remove the partation so it wiill not effct
>> the linux and it run as it is
>>
>>
>>
>> tahnks
>>
> Why do you neeed to remove it. You could just not mount in Linux and
> just let the Windows 2000 reformat it.
>
> THe real problem is that it is not the first partition on the disk.
> Windows likes to be in the first partition on the disk.

Windows doesn't care about being the first partition (witness all those 
diagnostic and recovery partitions that ship with machines these days).

Windows does need to boot from a primary partition, not a logical 
partition in the extended partition.  (AFAIK, Linux does also.)  My 
dual-boot machines have partitions

/dev/hda1 Diagnostics
/dev/hda2 Windows C:
/dev/hda3 Linux /boot (I put GRUB here and make it bootable).
/dev/hda4 Extended
/dev/hda5, etc. Other Windows and linux filesystems.

/etc/fstab isn't all that helpful, except to show that the partition you 
want isn't critical.  What we really need to see in order to help you is 
the output of fdisk -l /dev/hda.

>
> Using partition magic to move all the partitions over may or may  not
> work.

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs