Uninstalling Linux

[ele5125]

Unfortunately The caldera utility I was talking about that lets me edit partitions does not let me delete them. So I went searching and found a utility called fips. I downloaded its tar archive and unzipped it, I then copyed the fips.exe to my c:\windows\command and remooted to dos mode. I then ran fips, it displayed a partition table and other information, then it gave me the error:

Error: Last cylinder is not free



Is there a way I can fix this, since I cant boot to linux I cant use the linux fdisk or the cfdisk I learned about today.

[ele5125]

I just looked up the error about the last cylinder,
http://translate.google.com/translat...DUTF8%26sa%3DN
and here is what it said:

Last cylinder is not free

Last occupied cylinder
As long as the new partition is created after the old one and that it includes the last cylinder, the partition could not be divided if this last cylinder is not completely free. There are probably a hidden file of the image.idx kind or mirorsav.fil in this last cylinder. See Doc..

I don't understand what the image.idx is, I found lots of posts on news groups with a question about the error, the problem was finding one in english, they were mostly spanish frencvh and portugues, but i found another one writen in english,it mentioned changeing the file artributes of some files then run dfrag, but unfoirtunately my computer crashed so I did not get to wrte the files and corosponding artrib switches down,I am going to defrag and see what hapens when I run fips again.

[rcgreen]

FIPS is a utility that will reduce the size of your
windows partition, to make room for more partitions.
People use it when their system has windows
occupying the whole drive and want to make room
for linux. It doesn't sound like this is what you want,
since you already have free space, and only need to
create the appropriate partitions in that space.

When it tells you that the last cylinder is occupied, it
means that there is a hidden file at the end of the
windows partition that FIPS is unable to relocate,
but this is irrelevant unless you really needed
to go ahead and reduce the size of your Windows
partition.

Go ahead and boot the redhat install CD, and see if it will
create the partitions you need. Take care to choose custom install
and, when you get to the partitioning, leave the windows partition intact
and have LILO include windows as a dual boot option.

If the redhat install program won't delete the old linux partitions
and create new ones, then you may have to do something more
drastic, like nuking the entire MBR and starting over
with a fresh installation of windows, and linux.

[ele5125]

I realy apritiate all the help.

Things are starting to make sence, Caldera comes with partition magic, so it installed easily, therefor I became invisible to partitions, not knowing a thing about them because caldera took care of it. I learned that fips is for changeing the size of partitions to make room for linux, whereas fdisk can add and delete partitions, I also learned that the linux partition is invisible to windows fdisk because it is a difernt file system. So I found the documentation on how to install redhat at www.redhat.com and started reading, it makes sence. I used rawrite to create a boot image on my floppy, i then inserted the floppy and Cd then rebooted, the redhat instalation screen apeared. There were a few optiopns:

install or upgrade from redhat 2 or something
and expert mode

then it saidthe disk can no longer be used as a resuce disk, so I just chose expert

I started top answer questions till i got to the partitioning screen. It gave me a option to use disk druid or fdisk to partition, it said disk druid might be easyer so i chose disk druid. It had listed my primary partition as hda1, requested 1354MB Actual 1354MB and type was Win95 FAT32, I clicked the add button and it asked for some information, but what do I put there?

I know my HD is a IDE and has 2Gig of space but thats about all I know about it other then the manufacute is pioneer. I seen the part in redhat documentation telling you to find information before you start, I colected a lot of info and am still waiting for a reply from my monitors maufacture with the specks because they dont apear to have a web site, they are digital Equipment Corp.

In the red hat documentation where it shows you how to find system information i found most of it but some I could not find. Im just not sure what to put when i use disk druid to add a partition.

[ele5125]

I just found the documentation for disk druid at http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...TITIONING-FILE

It tells me what to type so I shal try that now, once again thank you so much for the help

[xmaddness]

Ahhh.. Behold the power of the Antionline forums. I wish you well in your adventure into linux. Understanding partitions is definetly not an easy task. It seems like your getting there though. Disk druid was what i used to choose which partitions i wanted to use, but I had to create the partitions before hand with Partition Magic. I would suggest you make sure your windows partition is defragged before you change any partition sizes(if your changing them at all) This will put all of your windows files at the beginning of the partition and should get rid of that last cylinder is occupied error. Well, if you need any other help, just ask. Thats what were here for.

[ele5125]

Redhat has been installed

My only problem now is getting the x windows system working since it boots to mode 3 with text, and when I type startx the screen goes black, I antisipate graphics but I waited less then a munute, maybe I should have waited longer but I did not want to take any chances with damageing my monitor so I turned off the power. I made a boot disk instead of useing lilo. Finaly after many hours of searching I found the specs for my monitor, it turns out Digital Equipment Corp must have merged with compaq or HP, so their home page was dificult to find, anyway the specks are:

Horizontal Sync Rate: 30KHz - 66KHz
Verticle Sync Rate: 50Hz - 1010Hz

So during the instalation process only one monitor made by DEC was in the list and that was not the S/N i have, my serial number is PCXBV-YA it turns out the last two characters did not match so I chose to manualy configure the monitor. And in the list available for horizontal sync rates the one I picked was standard VGA @ 60KHz and a small resolution of 640 by 480, i know mine can definately handle 600 by 800 but I did not want to take any chances, the ones with 600 X 800 looked like the frequency was starting to get high. Should I have picked a difernt one? And do you think if i waited a minute or so after typeing startx that it would have worked, I seen a black screen, waitied about 10 secs then turned off the power.

When i tryed the auto probs it detected my graphics adapter ok, but it choose a 8bit depth for my monitor which I think my monitor can handle more, plus when it was probing the screen was flashing on and off, then it did something funny, and then finished the prob. I am not sure if that was an indicator that it failed. I was expecting it to ask me if I saw something.

Sugestions?