LINUX AND HD PARTITIONS

[Almarton]

Dear Members

I am very new to Linux and after installed Linux Mandrake 7.2 in a laptop Toshiba Satellite 4600
I am a little desperate...

I installed Linux over Windows 98 and after I ran Partition Magic 4.0 to create a partition to use
MS DOS 6.22 to run my legacy programs (games).

Well after I got tired of all and re-partitioned the entire HD usind Win98 FDISK but I could
not get rid of GRUB boot loader even after re-partitioning and formating, the result is
that I cannot access my HD anymore only if by Floppy. There is nothing there (I believe)
but this remaining but loader. How can I restore my HD to a clean state, without Linux boot
loaders? My HD now encounters itself totally wrecked!!

Looking at your site I also become curious (amazed) what program to use and how to partition
a HD to have FAT16 FAT32 and NTFS at the same time?

Like yours:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 6 48163+ 16 Hidden FAT16
/dev/hda2 7 19 104422+ 16 Hidden FAT16
/dev/hda3 20 593 4610655 1b Hidden Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda4 594 3737 25254180 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 594 848 2048256 6 FAT16
/dev/hda6 849 2123 10241406 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda7 2124 2140 136521 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda8 2141 2523 3076416 83 Linux


I would be most gratefull if you could explain me this in detail because it would be
a real lesson and favor for me.

If it is a special software to partition please also attach it in a reply if possible.

Please also send answers to my
email: almarton@task.com.br
Many many thanks;

Yours trully
Alexandre Marton P. Santos
BRAZIL

 

[jkalbus]

Hi,

what you should do is either boot some linux on the machine and do a

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

this will erase the boot sector entirely or you could try to boot msdos from disk and do a

fdisk /mbr

that will do the same