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. 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...!