Formatting Linux Drive in Windows?
 

I have a weird situation so I'm going to try to lay this out as best as possible.

I have a dual-boot set-up of Windows XP Pro and Ubuntu (Linux) on 160 and 80 GB hard drives respectively. The Windows 160 drive was formatted into a few different partitions for specific data storage and such. I recently got a virus that tore into my C: drive which made me want to reformat, so I did the usual of making sure my music is safe and virus free and format the rest of the drive. Right now I would like to get rid of a few partitions but I can't because of the media data I have on there, so I was thinking of reformatting the Linux 80gb hd, moving the media to there, and reformatting the main drive again. But I forgot that the boot loader was on drive C:, which I formatted along with everything but my music and videos on the Windows partition and Ubuntu.

Is there anyway to access the Ubuntu drive and format it?

SAME exact situation happened to me on two different computers, same OS's and all, I think i even posted my lappy running an ubuntu session one day cause this happened.

Basically, you gotta either take the HD you want to format out and put it on another machine w/ windows running and format from there (i use partition magic for that) or reformat the HD w/ the bootloader on it completely. I know, it sucks.

I'm not totally sure I understand, but some random suggestions:

In a windows bootdisk, you can use fdisk /mbr to clear the master bootrecord, but it doesn't sound like that's what you want to do.. I think.

Whatever the case, a Linux LiveCD should do the job for you. Boot off Knoppix or whatever and you can edit/format/etc your hard drives until your heart's content.

If you have a linux partition and you want to format it in windows (which is what the subject of this is), and you still have a running windows, you can do it in Disk Manager. If you don't have a running windows, get a Win98SE boot disk and use fdisk from it to delete the linux (non-DOS) partition, recreate it as a normal DOS/Windows partition, reboot, and then format it (using that same boot disk).

www.bootdisk.com is handy.

I hope this helps in some way, still not sure what's going on ;)

Latch has your answer. Just use the computer you're on to make a bootdisk that will get you to a DOS prompt, fdisk the Ubuntu drive (it will, as noted, show up in FDISK as a non-DOS partition) into one big happy partition, then format and move the files you need.

A LiveCD will work, but unless you have one handy the bootdisk will be the path of least resistance.

Bah, new problem now. Got the linux drive to finally format, so I reformatted it to NTFS and started copying the music to the 2nd drive. My media partition has some files that are read-only which is causing various small error messages. So my question is, is there an easy way to just force the media drive to be copied to the (now) backup drive?

I'm guessing it's FAT32 or NTFS filesystem, and you're still on windows.

Go to a command prompt and type:

attrib -R /s /d C:\ (replace C:\ with whatever drive you want). It might take a while, but it unsets the "read only" setting on every file and directory on that drive.

Ahh perfect Latch. Thanks for the help everyone, this comp should be perfect again in just a few hours :D