Partitioned hard disk drive
When i installed Linux, it partitioned my harddrive into 4 partitions(i think). Since then i have had to format my hard drive but i think it is still in partitions. Is there anyway i can restore my harddrive to how it was before it was partitioned?? e.g. 1 partition.
what prog did you use? if it was partition magic then you’ll have to delete the partitions and then make a new one if its formatted for linux. You’ll be able to merge the rest if they were NTFS.
No the hard drive was partitioned during the Linux(SuSE) installation. As far as i know all i have on my HDD is win 98. I tried installing PM but it couldnt read the HD letter???
I just want to restore my HDD to one partition.
what OS do you want to end up with?
I had Win XP on the comp and wanted to dual-boot Win XP with Linux.
WHen installing Linux, it asked if i wanted to partition the drive. I did and it partioned the HDD. THen i ended up with Linux running run but i could not boot Win XP.
I want my harddrive to be one partition so i can install Windows, partition the HDD and install Linux on the other partition 
do you have any valuable data or can you just go ahead and do a full reformat now?
The easiest way is to reinstall xp, full format at install, then install PM> it has an option to format a partition especially for linux, and Suse will just install straight onto it. I did exactly the same thing about 2 weeks ago! lol
Thats where i hit another problem. I have XP home upgrade but when i try installing XP i get to a certain point and when it needs to restart, it restarts, gets just past the boot point and then displays a black screen…FOREVER! so i cant run XP 
I dont have anything valuable on the HDD.
Did you do a clean install the first time you went to xp?
Xp was on my computer when i got it.
Or do you mean when i tried installing it?
I tried both upgrade, and new installation (which formats the harddrive.) Neither work/.
Sorry i thought you said something about win98 a bit before, and thought you’d gone from that. Thats wierd ive never had a prob installing xp, especially on a freshly formatted drive. You say it gets just past the boot point, does it stall just before the windows xp loading screen would pop up?
“does it stall just before the windows xp loading screen would pop up?”
Yes!
have you tried installing a different version of windows or someone elses version of xp, just to see if it works. It could be something as simple as your disk being broke. If i remember rightly, the xp install restarts just after copying some files to HDD, it’s probably just after this point it messes up if it cant read you disc. (ive had this problem once before, but got it working by putting a different cd drive in just for the install)
Yes i tried installing a copy of Xp corp edition i have but the same happens with that.
Very strange then. I assume you havent changed anything physically? At this stage i’d prob physically take the HDD out put it in another of my machines and format it from there, de partition it and set it up that way. Obviously not always an option, soz i havn’t been much help mate!
Thats an excellent idea. I could put that HDD into this machine and then run partition magic to delete the partitions. Yes i think i will try that
Im formatting the HDD upstairs atm anyway.
Cool let me know how it goes. 
Hmmm, it could be that you have some faulty RAM, or that your HDD jumpers are not set properly. Concerning the RAM, check out MemTestx86. It takes a long time to run a thorough test, but it’s worth the trouble for the peace of mind. And as for the jumper issue, I advise double-checking your HDD jumper settings. For specifics, check out this other thread.
I used EFDISK to veiw my partitions and it came up with these. Should i delete them all and create a new one?>
[PHP]Disk Part FS Type Start/end Size Boot
First First Reserved 14426/26992 831050
First Second Reserved 47217/84194 265612
First Thrid Netware 3.11 11154/11154 0
First Fourth FAT 32 LBA 0/10380 76640 **[/PHP]
Yes, assuming you’ve backed up all of your critical data, go ahead and wipe it. Windows’ boot program is so poorly implemented that Windows must be installed on the primary partition of the primary HDD in order to function. Partition your HDD into two sections, one for Windows and leave the rest unpartitioned (leave that part up to your Linux distro). Install Windows, then Linux. That way Linux can handle the bootloader.
Seems its all sorted now i deleted the partitions and created 2 new ones.
first: = 20gb - containing Windows
Second : = 30gb - containing applications and data
Thrid: = 20gb - containing Linux
Hopefully all will work fine.
Thanks for your help 