Why Can't Windows Format The Foresight Linux Partition In The KPC?

For some, strange, reason you have decided to install Windows XP, or Vista, over your existing Foresight Linux OS, in the KPC. When you go to install Windows and try to delete the Linux installation, Windows is unable to do it and the installation is fails. For some particular reason Windows Setup cannot recognize the Linux partition, information hence it is unable to delete the partition, let alone, format it. Since the tools bundled with Windows are unable to accomplish this task, we must find another utility to do it. There are many tools available, both proprietary and freeware, that can do the job. Personally, I find it unnecessary to go out and purchase a tool to do a job that a free, open source, tool can do, just as well, if not better.

For this particular job, I've chosen an excellent multi-purpose utility called, "Parted Magic" Parted Magic is Linux-based and can be downloaded from the following URL, http://www.partedmagic.com as shown below:

The first thing we need to do is to download the appropriate file from www.partedmagic.com. To do this, please click on the "Downloads," link, located on the left hand side of the Parted Magic website as shown in the following image:

This will take you to the Download Mirrors section where you can find several links where you can download the utility as shown below:

Choose and click on a download mirror that will take you to the page where you can find CDROM ISO, USB and PXE versions of this utility. At the time of this writing, Parted Magic 3.0 is the current version of this utility and that's what we will use. We will also, be using the CDROM ISO version of Parted Magic 3.0 as it is the easiest to make. With that in mind I've clicked on, downloaded and extracted, "pmagic-3.0.iso.zip" The file contains the, "pmagic-3.0.iso" which we will need for this job.

Once we have the pmagic-3.0.iso image, we will need to burn it into a CDROM disk. For that, you'll need a CDROM Drive and a CD Burning application such as Nero. This step I will leave to the reader as everyone has a different CD burning tool which they, may, prefer to use. The end result, however, must be a bootable Parted Magic CD. Notice what I have just said! If you just drag and burn the, above, .iso file into a CD as you would with music files, then this will not work. Because only the reader knows what application they will use to burn the .iso image, they must figure out this step on their own. You will know that it worked if the computer boots off the CD after it is restarted and you see a Parted Magic Boot Screen, similar to the following, version 2.0, screen:

From the above screen, choose the first option and press Enter. If the first option does not work, feel free to try any of the graphical boot options until you find one that works for you.

This will begin the boot process which looks something like this:

The Parted Magic 3.0 OS will start to load, which you can confirm by noticing the myriad of messages that will scroll by. If the OS loaded successfully, you will be at the Parted Magic Desktop as follows:

Once there, all you need do is click on the GParted Icon that is located on Parted Magic's Taskbar as shown here:

This will bring up the GParted utility which will allow you to modify your hard drive's configuration at will. Please note that this is a very dangerous tool. Make sure that, if you have multiple partitions or hard drives attached to your computer, you choose the right one you wish to delete as all data will be destroyed. In my example, I have one primary partition labeled Foresight, attached to /dev/hda1 and formatted with the ext3 file system. There is a logical Linux swap partition, within an extended partition. Here's how my system's partitions looked: (yours will appear different):

If the above partition layout seems a little small that’s because it is. I have no wish to destroy my Linux partition just to demonstrate this procedure. Instead, I have created these hard drive partitions on another drive to accomplish the task. The steps are the same. Only partition sizes differ.

To delete the partitions in question, just left-click them with the mouse to highlight them, then right click on them and choose Delete from the popup menu that appears. Do this for every partition that you wish to delete. This is what I saw when I deleted the swap partition:

This is what I saw when I deleted the Foresight partition:

After all partitions have been highlighted and deleted, all that remains is to commit the changes that we've requested. To do this, all we need to do is to click on the button that has the green check next to it and says Apply as shown here:

If GParted does not allow you to delete multiple partitions at a time, just delete and apply one partition at a time until all partitions have been removed. Once removed you should see something similar to this:

Once this is done, you can Shut Down the Parted Magic utility. This will reboot the computer with an empty drive causing it to hang, complaining about a missing operating system, blah, blah, blah. Before you do, restart the computer, make sure you remove your Parted Magic 3.0 CD from the drive so as not to boot into it, again. You are now free to install Windows on this hard drive.

A NOTE ABOUT PARTED MAGIC:

Because this utility is open source and no money is being charged for its use, it is a good idea to make a small monetary donation, regardless of the amount, to help continue its development, specially if you find it useful and continue to use it. This will help foster further development not to mention to help keep it free.

Click to Shut Down