mack has another computer problem

59 gigs has just vannished

[mack]

instaled windows 98 on my older machine, It has a 60 gig hard file. After the windows install I tried to instal some of my software to be told didnt have enough disk space. Windows appears to think I only have 550 megs of free disk space. Any ideas how to enlarge the windows partiton. There are no other operating systems currenty being used on thie machine. It used to have linux on it. I woudld like to ofer the entire drive to win98 how would I do this?

Thanks in advance.

[caine]

Mack,

sounds like windows, buggering around. Bascially not a clean format of the partition, something me and my brother picked up on a few years ago. Re-do the format, but change the size of the partition only by mb's though, that should clear the problem.

If its not that, then you may need to sort out the linux side of the dual boot first.

[JayC]

59 gigs? Yeah, that's just about what Windows 98 takes. :)

Seriously, if it's a new installation and you don't have anything on it but the Windows install (and don't want to keep the Linux partition), the easiest approach is probably to just run fdisk. It should detect all of the partitions and let you delete any you don't need and reallocate the space to the one you want. Then reformat and reinstall.

[Alphawolf]

check out Partition Magic by PowerQuest

AW

PS- Is the BIOS of the system as updated as possible? Is LBA enabled in the BIOS? As long as the BIOS can autodetect your correct drive size you shouldn't have issues.

[mack]

so is it safe to use fdisk and remove all non dos partitions?

How would I enlarge the dos pation uaing fdisk?

Thanks for all the replies.

[caine]

fdisk, being part of the 95 toolkit, is by far the best way to kill the partitions, then you need to format the entire disk with a:/format c: then go back into Fdisk and rebuild your partitions.

[mack]

re-instal; and try again then?

any way to fix the problem without having to re-format?

[caine]

Mack,

bulletpoint, where you computer was - where you're computer is at now - and where you want it to be, then i will try to answer all the points.

[mack]

.Origionaly had win 89 from new.

.then installed duel boot suse 8.0

.removed windows and used entirley for linux

.now waiting on new machine to run linux on

.wish to use the old box (one with problem) entirely for win 98

What i did was insert win 98 cd rom in machine and followeed install procedure. I assume that doing this wouls remove linux from the disk or at least alow it to be over written. Now when i select properties from c drive it seams to think i only have 550 meg of hard disk.

Sorry about the confusion, i was getting the questions crossed over within the thread.

Thanks again.

[RussellC]

I bet you formatted the drive as FAT instead of FAT32. FAT partitions can only be up to 2GB. You should start over and make sure you enable the drive to have larger partitions and format it as FAT32.

[felix]

Yes, it seems that your disk was formatted as FAT rather than FAT32, but you probably don't have to reinstall. Partition magic (www.powerquest.com) can reformat on the fly and change from FAT to FAT32. It can also set up the additional partition you will need to take advantage of your full 60GB, since FAT32 only supports 32GB.

[caine]

do you have the win98 start up disk, as in the floppy RAMdisk, this has the tools that you need to format the HDD.

1. dir the floppy make sure that you have a) fdisk, b) format, and if you have an old PC, you may need to run the setup.exe, as the dr-rom/masterboard may not have the auto-reg bios to force the cd-rom onto the system.

2. load up fdisk, then delete all partitions.
3. reboot, load up format c:, this takes forever, tea time!
4. reboot, fdisk and partition which ever way you wish using primary as main, then logicals and extended's for virtual hdd's on the c: notes on fdisk, are quite good.
5. reboot, put 98 cdrom into drive, and load setup.exe, if the d:/ is not present, reboot with the floppy and run setup.exe of a:, then ramdisk will load, and load generic drivers for the cdrom, and then you should be able to go from their on your full disk with a 98 setup.

[WibbleWobble]

Do linux and Windows not use different storage things? Windows being FAT16/32, and linux being ... something else.

[mack]

OK I got it fixed.

Used the lunux installer to partion the hard file and create the win partition then removed the linux cd. Ran fdisk to remove all non-dos partitions. run windows setup and re-installed.

Thanks for all your input, I apreciate it.

[dingman]

Do linux and Windows not use different storage things? Windows being FAT16/32, and linux being ... something else.

Yup. Windows uses fat16/32 or NTFS for newer versions. Linux canonically uses ext2, though it can do perfectly well on others, including ext3 (journalling update of ext2), ReiserFS (another journaling fs), and JFS (another journaling FS). It can also read and write many other filesystems, including FAT and NTFS variations, though they can't be the primary file system that Linux runs from, and there have in the past been issues with Linux write support to NTFS volumes. Those may have been resolved since I last paid attention to them - I don't do Windoze, so I pay little attention to the state of the filesystem drivers for those formats. There are also hacks to pretend that a FAT filesystem supports some of the features needed to run Linux, and there at least used to be distributions that used them to avoid having to repartition your drive. I've never used one, and they have a reputation as a headache.

[netcommr]

I would take 'Alphawolf's advice and use Partition Magic, fdisk will not detect all partitions, notably NTSF.

Added...

and fdisk can get you into real trouble if a 'raid' has been used on that drive.