The results of not looking before I leap. Help.

[Xander-77]

Okay so now that I'm on here I see there are copious guides on how not to mess up installing SUSE. Now I wish I'd joined yesterday

So I've managed to install SUSE on my machine which has three hard drives. I wanted to keep the first as Windows only, the second as an experiment in Ubuntu and Kubuntu (which is like a nightmare so far (n00b here)) with the last reserved for SUSE. Well I messed it up. The HDD3 it was installing to was not the third HDD but the first one with an ID of 3 (I don't understand that but no matter). Now to further confuse things SUSE reckons it's got a 300+Gb HDD to play with which is odd cause the first HDD is 250Gb and the other two are both 80Gb!

All I want to do is remove SUSE without harming the Windows drive which it has installed to and try again. I'd rather not lose the Windows stuff as I've only just reinstalled this week (I was amazed how easily Linux goes in compared to Windows!).

Is there an un-install feature? If not then do I need to delete the individual files? Will that mess up Grub?

As an aside, is Linux always slower to start up than Windows? It seems to take an age (I did say I was a n00b ) !

Thanks in advance.

[vengeance]

well if u got ur xp boot cd just do fixmbr that would take care of grub ,then boot in windows and go to start-->run-->diskmgmt.msc and just delte the unknown (suse partitions) and then just reformat em back 2 ntfs /fat 32

[Xander-77]

Thanks.

Can I just delete the files that SUSE put on the Windows drive or should I leave them alone?

Also if it's rejigged the partition to put a small SUSE partition in there then is there a safe way to resize it? I tried partition magic before and it errored out and caused lots of problems trying to resize the main Windows partition. I was thinking of just booting into the disk itself but I'm not sure if that will work any better.

[vengeance]

partition magic cud cause problems as it really caused me bunch load of problems when i formatted my bro's disk put as secondary ,grub wud disappear linux partitions unknown wat not ,as far as keeping suse files on windows i don't have much idea abt it just keep em as it is.i wud suggest u a fresh install rather than having a small suse partition get all the partitions fixed then partition thru partition magic and then do a reinstall of suse.
i think ur suse boot cd/dvd also gives u an option of uninstall

[Xander-77]

Yeah I saw that someone hinted at a SUSE uninstall on here but there didn't seem to be any definitive resolution to the problem (no one seemed to be able to find the section with the uninstall in it). As the thread was old I didn't resurrect it but started this one in the hope that someone had sorted it by now.

[rcgreen]

The first thing you need to do is to find out
what has happened. Normally, Linux would not create a new partition
on your Windows drive without you knowing. Was this drive entirely
devoted to Windows? Are you sure Linux installed to this drive?
Do both systems boot and run?

If you can boot linux, open a command terminal and type the
command fdisk -l and post the output here. This is a list
of all the drives and partitions on your system. With this information,
we can advise you.

[Xander-77]

Righto.

I'm fairly sure it's installed to the Windows partition. Both operating systems start normally but when I go into the local drive on either I have more folders than I previously recall having.

I'll be interested to find out what has happened to make it think I have a 300Gb+ HDD. That's one major cause for concern. Does Linux auto stripe? I doubt it somehow.

Thanks, I'll get right on it as soon as I get home (posting from work is about the only thing keeping me sane ).

[gogalthorp]

In Suse or Ubuntu at a console type

su
then your root password (note the password will NOT echo)
so that you are running as root

then
fdisk -l (note that's a lower case L) to list your partitions

post results here. Folders are not changed in either OS. Though you can mount and see the Windows partition from Linux.

[vengeance]

that's a rare case it wud b installed to a windows partition still yeh post results of fdisk -l and /etc/fstab that wud make it clear abt suse installation

[Xander-77]

I'm going to have a go with the whole partition information this evening (yesterday was a little hectic) but I reckon that I'll only do it as an exercise.

I'm at present upgrading the thermal transfer compounds and I don't fancy risking the OS on a fix. I've only just installed it so once more can't hurt (how many times does that get said!).

As a point of interest if I devote two drives to SUSE alone and give it a whole drive for it's paging file, will it run a bit quicker? That's the only gripe I have at the moment, that in comparison to Windows (which is bloated by comparison right?) it takes an age to start up! I wondered if such hardware allocation may get back my snappy start up times.