Formatting my serial ATA, maybe find it first?

[Grimulus]

I'm wanting to wipe linux off of my serial ATA drive and format to NTFS. Linux is on my SATA and I can't figure out how to wipe it from linux and I can't get any wipe programs to find it on boot. so my question is, is my motherboard seeing the drive? it must if linux is working, but how in the hells do i format this thing?

 

[kof2000]

boot to dos and fdisk?

 

[Grimulus]

FAILURE! that didn't work unfortunatley.

 

[Ace1627]

I am not that familiar with Linux but you could always hook it up to another computer and repartition through windows cd or format through windows. You can also fit into a casing if you have one spare, or barrow a friends. It is usb so just hook it up to someones elses windows computer and you can reformat in no time. Hope this helps.

 

[kof2000]

hmmm his windows os probably wont see the linux drive

 

[Ace1627]

It should. Doesn't matter what os or data on the drive. Windows will just recognize it as another hdd. Hope this helps.

 

[kof2000]

no, what i'm saying is that it wont show up as a drive letter icon which you can click right so you can format it directly with the windows os booted?

 

[Ace1627]

Humm...always worth a try. Couldn't hurt.

 

[Grimulus]

yeah guys, i know how to format just fine through windows, it doesn't see the drive. dos doesn't see the drive. bios does, and so does linux...obviously...can i just format straight through linux?? that's what i'm really looking to do...i'm running SUSE 9.1 if that helps.

 

[kof2000]

maybe you can locate a lunux boot disk if theres one.

 

[Ace1627]

Well redhat will automatically reformat when you install it. That should take care of your problem. Hope this helps.

 

[Grimulus]

it formats and then starts the install...so maybe just watch it and kill it before it starts?? but it wouldn't put it in NTFS would it?

 

[Ace1627]

Honestly I do not know. Just knew that it reformats before the install. So that was what I was thinking. Heh. Kill it before it installs. Good luck. Hope this helps.

 

[jjohnston]

Umm. If your loading XP onto it, couldn't you just set your bios to boot from CD first, load in your Win XP cd, boot from that. when you start your install process at the bottom of the screen it will say, to install 3rd party SCSI or RAID drivers press F8 or F6 or something like that. Press that button, (make sure you have the drivers downloaded onto floppy first). After it loads all its stuff it will have an option to allow you to install your drivers from your Floppy. After going through all of this, it should give you the option to delete all partitions, and create a new NTFS Partition.

I don't really know anything about Linux but you could try that.