My pc is screwed

fdisk won't pickup a partition and I want to wipe everything but I can't as fdisk shows a logical partition in the extended partition but when I choose to delete the logical partition it says none exist, yet I can see it when I choose to view the partition table. It is just over a GB in size....no idea what it is. It maybe the linux swap but that should be non-dos so basically something is buggered..

Does anyone know of a way to totally wipe everything?

Will writing zeros to the drive do it?

Currently the drives are all messed up too. My C drive is showing as A: so who knows where the floppy went :)

Bear in mind this has to be done from linux or dos....I don't have an Windows installed.

Thanks.

:-)

- wil

Partition magic could help if you have it. Otherwise, you could wipe the drive clean by downloading the util from the manufacturer (does diags and such).

Adrian

mac user to the rescue .... haha well sort of

if you're gonna zero the baby anyway ...

1,) fire up mandrake ... redhat is well ... possible but couldn't figure it out .... I used mandrake install CD to repartition the whole drive ... did the install ... LOL ... waste of time, but do the whole drive as LINUX
2.) fire up mandrake again ... reinstall ... this time set the drive as win98/fat/bigmoney/bloat/ well you know
3.) exit the installer before it complains again that you don't have a drive partion to install on.
4.) pop in that big ol' XP CD and have some fun!


hehe ... blow out the BIOS and what ever else you have to do ... to zap the pram ... like I said hehe ... mac user ... I just pulled the battery / cpu / power box connecter from the MOther Board ... uhhhh ... pain the butt if you ask me ... (control-apple-p-r) on start up does wonders to a frigged ahhhem "registries"

will my method above work ??? hehe ... I'm using an Western blows HD that came with my G4 in a PC box so yeah , my method works

have fun!

---

openoffice + gimp + sketch ...

Back in business fellas. Thanks for your help.

I wrote zeros to the drive, then inserted my Windows 98 cd-rom which detected errors relating to the media byte code in the partition table. Luckily it fixed them so then I went to my dads pc and found the format program and formatted the new partitions.

Then I installed Windows 98 (Partition Magic doesn't work with XP ) and setup my partitions with partition magic. I have a 10GB C drive and then created an 8GB linux partition with a 2GB swap.

Also I have 2 x 20GB partitions on the second drive.

Then I upgraded Win98 to WinXP and now Im back in business except a MAJOR moment of sadness when I realised everything I'd backed up onto the new hard drive had been wiped....including my help desk.


....._but_ then I realised it was on a different partition due to the renaming of the partitions....PHEW

So I now have a nice clean empty pc

Just gotta re-enter all my email addresses into outlook...bummer....

Something cool happened though.....I didn't even have to install my ethernet card drivers as XP let me connect to the Internet without them...I guess it comes with a set of default drivers?

Paul, I have a similar problem when I switch from linux/unix/netware back to windows. If I've got a non-dos/logical partion that fdisk won't delete, I stick in Win2000 (I don't know if NT will do the same) and it will wipe everything regardless of what it is.