hey guys whats up, I am kind of a newbie to linux, and I just installed Red Hat 9, and I had a few questions I was hoping could be answered:

1. I have windows XP on another drive. I recently bought a 160gb hard drive, and in my lack of paying attention I accidently gave it all to Red Hat. My original plan was to give like 20-40 to red had and keep the rest for windows to write to. Is there anyway for Red Hat to free up some of the space I gave it without having to reformat and reinstall the OS from scratch?

2. During a trial and error run I installed red hat, then tried reformatting a portion of my large drive so that windows could see. By dooing that, however, I accidentally whiped out linux. Oops. When I tried rebooting, I couldn't get into windows, I was stuck in the GRUB boot loader. How did I get out that and just let it boot normally? I was so furstrated with this, I just reinstalled linux in the big drive and I wasn't paying attention and didn't partition it the way I wanted so the software formatted the entire 160 gb drive as linux.

My ideal solution would be to have like 120 gigs accessable to windows, and the rest for red hat. I have 3 hard drives, a 9 gig, a 20 gig and a 160 gig. XP is installed on the 9 gig, no OS on the 20 gig and red hat on the 160 gig. I have partition magic for windows, but it won't let me alter the partitions the linux installer created.

Any help would be apriated!

thank you
-=Chris=-

Start over. It wouldn't be worth the time and effort to repartition Linux drive especially there aren't any important files.

Just make one big FAT32 drive for file sharing between OSes.

ok, sounds good... but how do I create a partition that linux and windoze can share? I tried using partition magic to create about 10 gigs for linux to use, but once the install was finished windows did not recognize the other 130 gigs that were still paritioned as fat 32. It said the drive had to be formatted. I thought maybe that it just needed to reformat the windows parition and it would leave the linux portion untouched. This was a mistake, it messed things up a lot.

it would be great to have a big fat 32 drive they both could share! how do I do it?

thanks again for the help!

Yes once you create a partition it needs to be formatted. Instead of using PM try XPs disk manager.

Unless there is some limitation if the partition is at the physical end of the drive.

Yea, that made sense, but looking back, I made a few critical errors: I used PM to make 'free' space from that drive. Right after PM did that, the drive was still fat 32 and it was still accessable to windows. Once I installed RedHat on the space I recently 'freed' windows could no longer see that drive and said it had to be formatted. PM however said 10 gigs was a linux partition and the rest was fat32. I really shouldn't have done this, but I did, and I let windows reformat it... AS NTFS! I didn't realize how bad that was untill now. By doing that I lost my entire linux install, and I couldn't get out of the GRUB boot loader. I couldn't boot windows, and I couldn't reformat the drive with the emergency disk it came with because making it NTFS had screwed it up.

Thats when I reinstalled red hat, and I let it format the entire 160 gig drive as a linux parition. This fixed the GRUB boot loader problem, and let me boot windows again (as well as redhat), but now I can't write to the 160 gig drive in windows, and it says it needs to formatted, like it did earlier. I think now, however, I can reformat the drive using the utilities that came with it and just start over, but I'm afraid i'll get stuck in the console of GRUB boot loader again if I do that.

And thats where i'm stuck.

Stuck? Divorce her!

Grub/lilo sticks around after removal of Linux is because they stay outside of the normal space. Tech-speak, first sector of partition.

To remove it,
boot XP/2K CD
recovery console
FIXBOOT
FIXMBR

Oh and I used cfdisk free with Linux to partition the entire 40gig. I have 98, 2k and 2 Linux distros and one big fat32 for file sharing. Yes I had to format the win drives with Windows.

In 2K/XP, the fdisk is so easy that you could destroy everything. Don't repartition. Just choose one and format it as NTFS.