formatting

[seanlambert]

I have mandrake 10.1 community. I want to know how to format the harddrive when you have linux. thanks for the help.

[smindinvern]

well, it depends on your situation. What do you want, size, filesystem? Normally you would run the following commands to make a partition and format it under linux:

fdisk /dev/hdx # where x is the drive letter (a-z)
p # will print the current partition table
d # to delete a partition to make room for a new one
n # allocates a new partition, will ask you p for primary and e for extended, choose the appropriate one, and also partition number, chose one to fit in with your current setup
w # will write the new partition table to disk, make sure that the disk isn't mounted when you do this, or it won't be able to write it - also exits fdisk
mke2fs -j hdxX # where x is the drive letter (a-z) and X is the partition number (starting at 1), this will create an ext3 filesystem, alternatives are mke2fs - ext2, mkreiserfs - reiserfs

hope that answers all your questions

[seanlambert]

I want to format so I can install windows

[budman7]

You don't need to format the drive to install Windows.
Unless you want to install Win98, in which case you will need a Win98 bootdisk.
Win XP does its own formatting. Just put the cd in the drive and reboot.

[Cabhan]

With XP, just put the CD in, choose the partitioning you want to do, and it will format on its own.

Just as a miscellaneous note, installing Windows will overwrite your bootloader, I hear. If you have a bootdisk, you can boot into Linux and run lilo again. I believe that might get your bootloader up again.

[budman7]

When i read your post earlier, I assumed that you wanted to install Windows over Mandrake.
Or did you want to install Windows beside Mandrake?