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Subject: Re: Hard drive help From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 12:23:05 -0700 Quoting Martin Scherer (scherer@sonic.net): > Further suggestions were to boot linux with rescue and then attempt > rm mbr . The error message tell me no such file. Quite. The MBR is not a regular file. Boot Linux using your rescue diskette. Run /sbin/fdisk . Type "p" to "print to screen" (display) the current partition table. Then, use the "d" (delete) command to remove all non-FAT partitions. (By "FAT partition", I mean any partition indicated as type FAT+anything. Those are the existing DOS-readable ones. You may have none, depending on what's on your hard drive.) Type "w" to write this information to the partition table. Then, I believe it's "q" to exit. If you have more than one physical hard drive, do the above drill on the drives you do _not_ boot Linux from, first. I.e., if you have two IDE hard drives and Linux's "dmesg | more" command tells you they are /dev/hda and /dev/hdb, kindly do "/sbin/fdisk /dev/hdb" _first_, before you go clobber /dev/hda's partitions when you run /sbin/fdisk with no parameters (which would make it use /dev/hda, your boot hard drive, by default). The Linux kernel gets very unhappy when you destroy the root filesystem underneath it, you see. Reboot, booting from an MS-DOS floppy. _Now_ type "FDISK /MBR", to write the traditional brain-dead Microsoft MBR program into the Master Boot Record. Now create new FAT partitions (however many you want) using just FDISK with no parameters, format them using FORMAT, etc. ===