how do i get LINUX off my machine?

[MrDingleDangle]

i want both linux and windows on my machine...but right now i only have LINUX, but i need to have windows on....i was going jsut to reformat this hard drive and put Windows, later deal with getting LINUX back on...but when i try using the win98 disk it gives me an error saying there is no hard drive that it can use...it says it will reformat it, but then it says it runs out of memory


i loaded using a bootdisk and tried fdisk, but it locks up everytime i try it

 

[TheOmegaCode]

If you have Partition Magic, you can use that, or you can boot to your Linux CD/floppy, wipe the drive, and then install Windows.

 

[Electrode]

yeah, boot from a linux boot disk, then run this command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024

It takes quite a long time (an entire afternoon on my 40 GB drive!) but will totally erase your hard drive. From there, nothing should have any problem working with the drive, since it will be "factory clean".

if the drive in question is something other than the primary master IDE drive, change /dev/hda accordingly.

 

[cleverhandle]

You could probably just run Electrode's command and kill it after a few seconds. That would be enough to zero out the MBR and partition table, and DOS fdisk can rewrite those. The rest of the drive would not be clean, but that should make no difference.

 

[MrDingleDangle]

thanks....will try it

 

[Vadatajs]

Originally posted by: TheOmegaCode
If you have Partition Magic, you can use that, or you can boot to your Linux CD/floppy, wipe the drive, and then install Windows.

I agree. Partition magic is a handy program. I've never had any problems with it. It's definitely worth the price.

 

[bromer]

Originally posted by: Electrode
yeah, boot from a linux boot disk, then run this command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024

It takes quite a long time (an entire afternoon on my 40 GB drive!) but will totally erase your hard drive. From there, nothing should have any problem working with the drive, since it will be "factory clean".

if the drive in question is something other than the primary master IDE drive, change /dev/hda accordingly.

Well.. you write zero's to your hard drive. If would be much faster (and better, I think) to use /dev/null. Then the disk would be formated. You just wrote zero's all over the disk!

 

[Nothinman]

Just boot the Linux install CD, go through the setup until you get to the partitioning part, delete the partitions and reboot.

 

[bromer]

Originally posted by: bromer

Originally posted by: Electrode
yeah, boot from a linux boot disk, then run this command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024

It takes quite a long time (an entire afternoon on my 40 GB drive!) but will totally erase your hard drive. From there, nothing should have any problem working with the drive, since it will be "factory clean".

if the drive in question is something other than the primary master IDE drive, change /dev/hda accordingly.

Well.. you write zero's to your hard drive. If would be much faster (and better, I think) to use /dev/null. Then the disk would be formated. You just wrote zero's all over the disk!

Just ignore what I wrote... a bunch of ***************