dual boot, format windows, help

[chunyu]

hi all
i am a new user of knoppix
I have dual boot of windows and knoppix in my machine...
now, i want to format my windows partition
will it affect the knoppix partition??
I'm afraid after reinstall windows, the GRUB can't be loaded
any suggestions for me??

thanks

[Kowood]

Formatting the Windows partition should not affect any other partitions, as long as you don't change the size. I would reccomend that if you are going to use for Knoppix as well, that you simply use it as another Linux partition, rather than extending your present partition to it.

[jjmac]

Howdy,

Why do you need to reformat your windows partition.

What windows are you talking of ?

Could you post the output of the following between" code" tags p;ease ... that is, the word "code" between an opening squared brace and a closing squared brace. With the closing tag basically the same but with a forward slash before the letter "c" in code.

Just so it renders well.

]# cfdisk -Pt /dev/hda

There are a numver of different ways to arrange multi-boot. But more info is really needed.

The output from that command will tell people just what the partition setup looks like which is needed to be able to suggest anything of any use.


jm

[rcook]

Formatting the windows partition will not overwrite the master boot. If you reinstall windows, it will overwrite the master boot sector. In that case boot up with a Knoppix CD, mount your Knoppix partition, as rw, from a root terminal do a chroot to the mounted Knoppix partition and then grub-install /dev/hd? where the ? is your boot drive, most probably a, the first hard drive. Exit to get out of the chroot and then exit from the root terminal and it is all back together.

[jjmac]

Fine, the person installs grup onto the mbr, than at some later stage uninstalls by an overwrite or a partition deletion. Not hard to guess the result.

With some info on just how the disc is divided, as the above "cfdisk" output would provide, a more efficient boot scenario can just as easily be done.

Is it XP ??

I have been reading a number of posts where people have just added an entry to their hidden boot.ini file in XP for their linux partition. And the 1st stage grub had to be copied as a file to their "C:\" drive. Easily done with dd.

Place grub on the 1st sector of a primary-extended or a Linux primary, set it active in the mbr table. If an erronous uninstall occurs ... boot with knoppix LiveCD, invoke fdisk or cfdisk and re-set the windows partition active.

But !!, really need the info first ...


jm