First hurdle in installing to HD

[kranberry]

I am trying to use qtparted to delete and format a partition for installation. However, it always shows the device as busy and won't actually do anything with it.

The partition is the second half of a 40GB drive, which is the second drive in the system. It is reported as hdb2 with hdb5 uder it. I have tried to delete both of these entities, but with no luck.

How can I release this partition for deleting? umount doesn't seem to work since it is not mounted. The partition itself was left unformatted. Do I have to umount the whole drive?

I hesitate to try fdisk since I am not comfortable with using it.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

[Harry Kuhman]

...How can I release this partition for deleting? umount doesn't seem to work since it is not mounted. The partition itself was left unformatted. Do I have to umount the whole drive?

I hesitate to try fdisk since I am not comfortable with using it.

Any ideas?....
You certainly should be able to delete the logical partition (hd5) and then the edtended partition (hs2). I can't walk you through the Linux tools, just not enough experience with them. Fdisk should work, although some old versions of fdisk refused to delete non-MS partitions (it's not clear what type of partition that unformatted hd5 is). One nice tool I like, that runs under the MS OS's (or runs completely stand-alone when you use the fantastic XOSL boot loader) is Ranish Partition Manager (http://www.ranish.com/part/). I'm very happy with it and have had to use it in some cases where Fdisk simply wouldn't create what I wanted. Make sure you actually save your changes after you make them.

[fingers99]

Or you might like to try cfdisk: generally it's easier to use than fdisk and less buggy than qtparted.

[babelbrennt]

I am not sure if it was just me or not or if using 3.7 is different from the newer versions but when i tried using cfdisk the knoppix-installer wouldn't recognise my cfdisk partitions and sent me to q-parted every time (I am a bit accident prone and have had to re-install several times). On top of which i got several error messages after the q-parted partitioning, which seemed fine until I made a mistake and had to re-install or /sbin/lilo and my hard drive had been goofed. after spending weeks nay months working on this and encountering this problem I am sticking to partition magic which seems to work greaT (THOUGH YOU WOULD LOSE THE DATA ON THE FIRST PARTITION) It might just be me but...!