Hard Drives not showng up

[Brazucs]

[Bombu]

Red Hat is not free (in fact it can cost a LOT, depending on what you choose to buy). As far as I can tell it is pretty much tailor made as a business operating system and not a home computing os.

[NETWizz]

Actually, that is not true entirely.

Red Hat is free and distributed with the same Linux Licence.

What you actually are paying for is support. If you buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux for an Enterprise business, you want support.

You can download and use Red Hat Enterprise Linux legally at least according to the Linux Licence!

As for Red Hat, they also make Fedora Core Linux, which is fine for the Home Computing OS.

[shadowing]

Technically, all Linux distro has to be free to download. However, you can sell it on media's, such as CD's

[Bombu]

I never saw a download link for Red Hat.

[NETWizz]

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedo...ore/3/i386/iso/

However, for your situation I recomend you get a simple boot floppy. There is no need to downoad 4 CDs just to remove your partition. If you must, download CD 1. It will have plenty of stuff on it to remove all partitions.

[Bombu]

Isn't that the link for Fedora linux the one by the people that made red hat, but its made up of freeware programs (For and by community)?

[NETWizz]

Um, yes that is it.

It is also their test environment to try new things before incorporating them inot Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For example, they are testing SE Linux Enhancements.

I am certain Disk 1 comes with all of the partitioning stuff.

[Bombu]

Ive tried Zool Linux (Single floppy disk) and Linux recovery disks (2 disks) but neither work.

Zool Linux loads and says "Starting Kernel..." and then the computer reboots and linux doesn't load.

The recovery disks just freeze.

Is it my computers or is it the disks?

[wrigley]

sounds a bit much in my ear downloading linux, simply to be able to work your harddrives, I did a google on FDISK and came up with this. Replace fdisk on your startup disk with this one, and do what you need to do

btw. neither windows95 nor DOS support harddrives over 2GB, if your harddrives are just slightly over 2GB due to standard inaccuracies of manufacture, they might not work in the OSes

[NETWizz]

I can tell you from experience that you should have a Pentium 2 or better or the Linux Kernel will often not boot.

At least in my experinece Kernel 2.4 and 2.6 will not boot on a regular Pentium.

However, old kernel 2.2 does seem to boot on regualar Pentiums.

[NETWizz]

[wrigley]

The FDISK linked to above, is a Microsoft FDISK clone, only difference is the fact that this FDISK program will accept other filesystems as well not just fat12, fat16, fat32 and NTFS

[NETWizz]

Really, I do not see why it even has to recognize the partition type to delete it.

Let me simplify things for you.

You get a hard drive your BIOS will recognize. It will automatically see the right size!

Next, it does not make any difference what is on the drive! Just nuke the first 512 bytes starting at sector/cluster 0.

When you install your OS, it will think you have a new hard drive. It will write a disk label and new partition table. It will then format the partition(s) and put some sort of table (FAT/MFT/INODE...) put a trivial program in the MBR with boot code and a defining boot sector in the first sector of each partition.

Serrioulsy, nuking and starting over again is so easy to do!

Since you are using DOS, you could actually do a hard disk debug script though I would recomend you actually use a standard program first.

What I mean by debug script is an asm program to erase the MBR.

[NETWizz]

Here is how to do it from a DOS boot floppy:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q106419/

I am telling you you should only do this if you have a lot of time and are willing to waste time and do things the hard way!

[Arcane Wizard]

I'm too smart to get my PC to boot into that Recovery Console thing the Windows XP installation CD is supposed to have, is there any way to run fixmbr without using that illusive Recovery Console?

[NETWizz]

Not that I know of.

All you do is put in your CD and press R or whatever it tells you to get to the recovery console.

Eventually, you choose your Windows installation by pressing 1 usually.

Then you supply the admin password.

[Arcane Wizard]

All I ever managed to get was some ugly Microsloth you're-at-a-half-loading-half-loaded-dos-gui-that-tries-te-look-as-good-as-unix-installs'-guis-but -looks-like-a-crashed-javascript-site-that-won't-load-further-because-it-needs-to-unpack-40GB-of-data-from-a-DVD-drive-at-the-speed-of-a-floppy-disk-and-doesn't-tell-you-how-far-it's-advanced-nor-whatever-program--or-feature-or-screen-you've-just-booted-into -so-you-haven't-a-clue-about-what's-going-on-except-that-the-DVD-drive-sounds-like-it's-gonna-blow setup-like program.

Would that be the recovery console? If so, would it be easier to just reformat, rewrite 400mb of homework, and redownload 4gb of music instead of waiting for that loading to finish?

[NETWizz]

The recovery console looks like this:

c:\>

You can type help to get a list of commands.

Please use the space bar in the future.

It would not be easier to re-write homework and download music.

Hell, you could easily take your hard disk out and make it a slave hard disk in another Windows 2000/XP/2003 System to get your homework and stolen music copied off of it.

[leofox]