[AuckLUG] RE: DELETING PARTITIONS(OR NEWBIE PLAYING WITH

[Li, Chi (Contractor)]

Hi Alan

You did not tell us the partition size.

Notebooks tend to have a FAT 16 boot partition and a FAT 32 partition
which is hidden for recovery purpose. You can press a magic key to kick
off the recovery process during boot. When you go through those process,
you will be back to OEM.

It appears that you have a XP Home on you notebook. OEM tend to use FAT
32.

There you have it. If you blow away the FAT 16 and FAT 32, you will not
be able to recovery your notebook to OEM.

By the way, the i386 folder on the C:\ contains everything you need to
install XP except the s/n. You can use that i386 folder and make a
bootable CD. Let me know if you want the instruction.

Sorry guys, this is not a Linux discussion.

Regards

Chi

Message: 4
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:50:04 +1300
From: Alan Nicholson <alan.nicholson at janal.co.nz>
Subject: [AuckLUG] Fwd: DELETING PARTITIONS(OR NEWBIE PLAYING WITH
	FIRE!!!)
To: aucklug at linux.net.nz
Message-ID: <200701311950.04763.alan.nicholson at janal.co.nz>
Content-Type: Text/Plain;  charset="iso-8859-1"




I have an Acer Laptop that came originally with WinXP loaded. Although I
hardly ever use it I would like to keep it as a backup for my wifes PC -
she is a bit more locked in to M$ as she is an contract Project Manager
who frequently deals with companies who are solely M$ based. As its a
legal copy (albeit with NO backup CD copy if anything goes wrong) I
would like to be sure not to delete it.

Some time back I loaded SLED 10 on  a trial basis and later installed
Suse
10.1 so it now has the 3 OS loaded.

I've now decided to move to OpenSuse 10.2 but want to retain the XP
partitions and delete all the others and do a fresh install. I could let
Suse 10.2 do the repartitioning or I have GParted as a live CD so I
could  use that. My problem is ensuring that I don't delete the
partitions that relate to XP

When I look at the partitions using GParted I see:

Dev/hda1		fat32
hda4		extended
hda5		linux-swap
hda6		reiserfs  (pretty sure this is SLED10as the Bootloader
shows SLED10 as
			hda6)
hda7		linux-swap
hda8		ext3
hda9		ext3
hda2		fat32
hda3		fat16

I am assuming that the extended,fat32 & fat16 partitions (hda 1,2 3 &4)
are WinXP. If I look on "My Computer" it looks like the hard drive is
set up as 2 drives - C & D. Hence my assumption that the 4 partitions
relate to WinXP.
hda6 is SLED with the remaining partitions 5,7,8,&9 being allocated to
either Suse 10.1 or SLED. If this is the case then I assume that I would
be safe in deleting all partitions except 1.2. 3 & 4.

Am I correct in my assumptions or am I playing with fire deleting these
remaining partitions.

Can anyone tell me how to be sure that I am not deleting the XP
partitions or suggest how I can clean out 10.1 & SLED10

Alan

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