Unpartitioning question

[bopdude]

Hi all, a quick question.

I have a HP Zd8000 laptop that has a hdd partitioned to give 3 drives, + the restore drive / partition, each one has a different OS on it. I have all the original restore and driver disks for the original XP home install.

What I would like to know is the easiest way to format to wipe the lot clean and give me one partition again to install the OS of my choice.

Thanks in advance and sorry if it's a daft question.

[Aragorn]

XP setup CD will allow you to re-partition.
Alternatively, the system rescue CD (Linux) has a partition manager, as do all Linux installers.

[Uncle Peter]

XP setup may have problems removing anything other than an NTFS or FAT/32 partition. You could always use a zero-fill ("low level format") utility such as HDDGURU to re-initialise the disk.

[punky]

You need a partition manager like fdisk. Its on the XP setup disk as well as some other boot disks. Alternatively, if it has a floppy drive you can create a floppy boot disk and run fdisk off that.

Either way, once you run fdisk, you just delete all the partitions one by one until you have none, and then re-create one using all the space.

I know you know but in case anyone else is tempted to do this, you'll lose all the data stored on the disk (making it very difficult to get back)

[Stuart]

Or, you could try "killdisk". http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

Anything other than the xp disc will be making life hard for yourself imo. Just boot from it and delete all partitions. The restore partition will be marked unknown most likely just delete that to then create a new one will take seconds.If you fdisk using a floppy and the old dos fdisk it will take ages

[bopdude]

Thanks for the replies, all points taken on board, the easiest thing from my point of view then is the Zing's way.

Thanks all, I'll let ya all know how it went

Greenies winging their way