Cannot format a disk that contained Linux before

  • Thread starter Thread starter Martin
  • Start date Start date
M

Martin

Hello
I've Installed SUSE Linux 9.3 and wanted to format it later in W2K.
The problem is that fdisk and disk administrator hang or throw an error when
trying to format this disk.

Under DOS, fdisk hangs in the step of list the partitions. Under W2K, Disk
Administrator shows an error message saying that the service threw an error,
or that the request timed out and the operation could not be completed.

How can I delete the information in the boot sector or somewhere that
prevents me from formatting this disk?

Thank you in advance to everyone
 
Martin said:
Hello
I've Installed SUSE Linux 9.3 and wanted to format it later in W2K.
The problem is that fdisk and disk administrator hang or throw an error when
trying to format this disk.

Under DOS, fdisk hangs in the step of list the partitions. Under W2K, Disk
Administrator shows an error message saying that the service threw an error,
or that the request timed out and the operation could not be completed.

How can I delete the information in the boot sector or somewhere that
prevents me from formatting this disk?

Thank you in advance to everyone
Click to expand...
You probably need to delete all info in the first few KB of the MBR.
I've done this using Norton's Disk Edit but I'm sure there are other
possibly free utilities to do this. Once you have a utility that can
edit the MBR, overwrite whatever is there with all 1's or FF's, whatever
the editor designates it as. Once you've done that you will have taken
out what Linux put in there and fdisk, etc will work normally.
 
Hi Martin,

How can I delete the information in the boot sector or somewhere that
prevents me from formatting this disk?
Click to expand...

I'm not entirely sure why these tools should respond to MBR corruption by
falling over, nor exactly what Linux might have put there to in any way
upset any standard partitioning tools, but anyway ...

1. If you have access to a live CD that you can use to boot Linux (EG
Knoppix), do so and get to a root shell. Then, you could use something
like:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1K count=64
(assuming /dev/hda is the disk in question, i.e. pri/mast). That oughta
wipe out enough to keep the tools happy (but there's then absolutely no
hope of recovering any bootsector there, if you need to - unfortunately,
Windows tools are known to depend on zeroing out the actual partition
bootsectors/MDs for newly created partitions).

2. IBM's wipe.com or zap.com are cute little programs for DOS written in
X86 assembler. They use int13 BIOS and have only 8gbyte access, but that's
*more* than enough for your purpose. :-) Find them on the net somewhere;
let me know if you can't and I'll try to dig them out for you.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Sabahattin
 
Rod,
Thank you. I used the Ranish Partition Manager that came in the bootable cd
at www.ultimatebootcd.com
I deleted one partition with this tool and set the Master Boot Record from
Unkown IPL to Standard IPL.
After that I could run fdisk normally and format the disk.

I think this tool did what you said, but I am not sure.
Best regards and thank you for your guidelines.

Martin
 
Sabahattin,
First of all you were very kind and your advices pointed me in the right
direction.
As I said to Rod Carty, I used the Ranish Partition Manager setting the MBR
from its state of Unknown IPL to Standard IPL.
Also I downloaded zap and wipe and read their documentation, while booting
with ultimatebootcd that I have found earlier that afternoon. I agree with
you they are great tools and fortunately I could solve my problem in the
previous step.

I downloaded zap and wipe from this location:
http://www.isgsp.net/files/ibm-wipe-zap.zip and thanks to the owner of this
site.

Thank you, best regards
Martin
 
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