This is a bit of a weird one - basically I intended to set my new hard drive up as follows:
Partition 1 - 4 GB Fat32 Partition for my Windows swap file
Partition 2 - 147GB NTFS Partition for my Windows install
Partition 3 - 147GB NTFS Partition for whatever (stuff that I don't want to lose if I have to reinstall Windows etc).
Anyway, I messed it up - during install I accidently started installing to Partition 1. I stopped it, but the end result is that all 3 partitions are now formatted as NTFS (although Windows is on partition 2, so that's one saving grace I suppose!).
As partition 1 is NTFS, my swap file on there is fragmented, and not as efficient as it could be due to NTFS being slower than Fat32. I tried to reformat it in Windows, but it gets all the way to the end of the process and then says it cannot complete the format.
I then booted using an Ubuntu live CD, and took a look at Gnome Partition Manager. This is what I have:
<table frame=border border=5>
<tr><td>Partition</td><td>Filesystem</td><td>Size</td><td>Used</td><td>Flags</td><td>etc....</td></tr>
<tr><td>/dev/sda1</td><td>NTFS</td><td>4GiB</td><td>23.7MiB</td><td> boot</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td>/dev/sda2</td><td>extended</td><td>294GiB</td><td>--</td><td>lba</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td> /dev/sda5</td><td>NTFS</td><td>147GiB</td><td>9.86GiB</td><td></td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td> /dev/sda6</td><td>NTFS</td><td>147GiB</td><td>7.19GiB</td><td></td><td></td></tr>
</table>
So is the reason Windows won't format it because of the NTFS crap on it, or because it has the boot flag set?
If so could I use Gnome Partion Manager to set another partition as bootable (presumably /dev/sda5 as it has Windows on it) and format it as FAT32? Or having removed the boot flag would Windows then be cool about formatting it?
Any advice would be much appreciated.