What would happen if I deleted partitions from the terminal?

[webster]

I'm trying to install windows xp on a hard drive that has fedora installed. When I booted the windows xp cd, it would get stuck on a blank black screen after displaying the words ""Setup is inspecting your hardware configuration."

I searched for that problem and the solution to it seemed to be to clear the mbr. I tried doing that in fedora from the terminal using: dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sda1 bs=446 count=1

That didn't work. I kept getting this message: 0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 2.2978e-05 s, 0.0 kB/s

At this point, I backed up all my data in fedora thinking that I would delete the fedora installation and start anew with xp and then reinstall fedora.

I had an old slackware cd around that I thought I could use to run fdisk from and delete the partitions for fedora. But, when I did that I found that it wouldn't recognize any partitions. I kept trying to print out the partition table and it would display nothing.

But I can view the partition table when I run fdisk from the terminal in fedora. Unfortunately I lost the cds I used to install fedora long ago and I don't have any blank cds that I could write isos to. So, my question is would there be any disastrous consequences if I deleted the fedora partitions from the terminal while running fedora? Or is there a much simpler solution to my problem? Thanks.

[bigtomrodney]

I searched for that problem and the solution to it seemed to be to clear the mbr. I tried doing that in fedora from the terminal using: dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sda1 bs=446 count=1

That didn't work. I kept getting this message: 0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 2.2978e-05 s, 0.0 kB/s

Just checking, did you run that as root? If you didn't run this as root you might get an error like this.

[webster]

Yeah, I ran it as root.

This is what I see as the partition table in fedora:

Disk /dev/sda: 400.0 GB, 400088457216 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 48641 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00045110

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 25 200781 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 26 19402 155645752+ 8e Linux LVM

In fdisk on slackware, it would display nothing at all.

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

Try it like this, again as root:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1

[webster]

That worked, but the problem with the windows xp installation cd not working still remains.

I found an installation cd for ubuntu and it can recognize the partitions for fedora. But I just realized that it doesn't work like slackware where you can use fdisk separately from the installation process. Ubuntu requires me to create partitions specifically for it.

I'm trying to create a ntfs partition for xp and then create partitions for ubuntu, but he ubuntu cd only has options for fat16/32 not ntfs. But I guess this is a question for the ubuntu forum.

[reed9]

XP has a hard time recognizing linux partitions, but if you partition to FAT32, your XP disc should work fine.

[rokytnji]

Just curious. Do you still have the fedora cd. If so you can boot up live with it and use Partion editor in fedora to delete all partitons in hardrive in live mode. This will leave hardrive as unallocated space which Windows Xp will be able to boot up on and format as ntfs. Then you can use whatever Linux distro you install to shrink the ntfs partition to whatever size you wish to install your linux distro onto. You can make a swap partion also this way. Good luck

[vitalka]

I suggest to use Gparted Live CD.