Howdy yonatan,

I suppose you could wipe it if you really wanted. But if you don't mind doing that, you could also use the oppertunity to experiment with recovering its' geometry state. As it only seems like about 6Mb's or so, i suppose you could tar.gz things up from there and put them on hda temporarily, if needed.

I guess you must be able to get into your Linux on hdb. Which makes sense, as Linuxes loader isn't going to use geometry any way.

Did you try the ...

]# sfdisk -d /dev/hdb | egrep -v '^(Warning|Dos)' | sfdisk --no-re-read -H255 /dev/hdb

command.

That should just take the logical sector fields from the hdb table, and rewrite a 255 head based geometry.

(Just in case ... the verticle bar is just a "pipe" symbol, on the keyboardm top-row, to the right.)

But, if you insist on deleting it...

fdisk will delete the partitions. But cfdisk would probably be clearer in what its doing. Then just re-boot, no more access to hdb. No real need to do much more, except for making sure you can then get into Win.


You mention Lilo in your first post, i guess thats been installed to hda. You probably should run ...

]# lilo -u

before deleting hdb's table. That will restore the original generic loader that existed before Lilo was installed. Then set the main windows partition in hda "active" before the re-boot.

If you installed any loader to hdb, well, you could zero the first sector, but i wouldn't worry about it to much.

Main thing ...

]# lilo -u
]# cfdisk /dev/hda

Set windows partiton active,

]# cfdisk /dev/hdb

Delete all partitions on hdb,

Re-boot.... You won't have hdb any more ... I'd just muck about with hdb first though. Just for the experiment. You may be able to fix the geometry . When an oportunity comes by ...

You also mentioned "parted", is that what you used to create/delete the reiser partition. There have been issues with that program in the recent past, but only with the 2.6.x kernel series.

The lilo -u cmd should be ok, but, if you look in your /boot directory, you should see a file that looks like "boot.0300". That will be the hda mbr, plus its' table. If you copy that to a floppy you will have a boot disk for hda, as it was before the install.

]# dd if=/boot/boot.0300 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1

Carefull with "dd", it's a bugger of a command when its' switches get reversed.

Good Luck


jm