[vox-tech] remove the windows partition

[Alex Mandel]

harke wrote:
> On Wednesday 06 August 2008 20:11, Hai Yi wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> My home PC has dual OS, one is Ubuntu 7.10, the other is Windows XP.
>> However, my windows has stopped working for quite a while.
>>
>> So I figure, I will remove the windows partition and use it as my
>> Ubuntu's secondary disk, and install a svn server as a repository for
>> my code/document.
>>
>> I'd like to know if there is an easy and feasible way to accomplish my
>> goal, without affecting my current Ubuntu installation?
>>
>> Any tool/utility?
>>
>>
>> Maybe it's just easier to install a brand-new 8.0.4... :-)
>>
>> Thanks a lot,
>> Hai
> Its not really difficult but you have to be very careful
> because a mistake could be very bad.
> First you should take windows out of the boot menu.
> If you are using grub you can do this by editting the
> menu.lst file, usually located in /boot/grub
> BUT, be very careful. If you screw up menu.lst, you may not be
> able to boot at all.
> Then you can use fdisk to change the second drive into
> a linux partition. Again, you need to be very careful. If you
> fdisk the wrong drive, you are hosed.
> After fdisk, you need to run mkfs to put a file system
> on he drive.
> Last you need to mount it. You may want to create a new
> directory under / as a place to mount it. Also you
> should update fstab so it mounts automatically whenever
> you boot your machine.
> 
> If any of this sounds esoteric, I would recommend
> bringing your machine to an install fest which usually
> happens about once a month. It can probably be done
> in a half hour or so.
> 
> Richard Harke
>
I'll second most of what Richard said but suggest you might want to use 
gparted (Parition Editor under the System->Administration menu) over 
fdisk if you're unfamiliar with fdisk, the graphical tool is quite easy 
to use.

Your windows entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst looks something like the 
following and is likely the last entry in the file:
title           Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root            (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader     +1


To figure out the UUID of your partition in case it's not already in the 
fstab:
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

And yes we can easily help you do this at an installfest too.

Alex