HELP! how do I format a locked linux hd?

[evoluzione]

this one's got me wondering....

i pulled two hard drives out of my dead TiVo (which is run on Linux as far as I'm aware) and want to put them in a spare G4 I have. One is a 20GB and the other, a 40GB.

I put them in the G4, they're the only two drives, and they show up fine when booting from a CD (don't forget these are the only two drives in the machine so i have to boot from a CD. Now, I want to format them, and they only show up as 10MB drives. If i boot from an OS 9 CD I can see a bunch of tiny locked partitions but I can't seem to unlock them or format them at all. When booting from a 10.3 CD I only see the one 10MB partition on each disk.

is there any way I can get the full use out of these drives???????

 

[Laslo Panaflex]

Yeah, but I don't know of any way to do it on a Mac, you are going to have to do it with a PC. You need to put them in a PC and boot to a Dos bootdisk, then run fdisk. Hopefully you should be able to erase the partitions from there, if not, you are going to have to go back to the dos prompt and use the command fdisk /MBR. This will format the master boot record and can be used to get rid of pesky linux partitions. I would be careful using fdisk /MBR however, because it could ruin the drive. You might want to look up how to do both of the above since my descriptions were lousey.

 

[evoluzione]

much appreciated, thanks mate

 

[tomf87]

Originally posted by Laslo Panaflex
Yeah, but I don't know of any way to do it on a Mac, you are going to have to do it with a PC. You need to put them in a PC and boot to a Dos bootdisk, then run fdisk. Hopefully you should be able to erase the partitions from there, if not, you are going to have to go back to the dos prompt and use the command fdisk /MBR. This will format the master boot record and can be used to get rid of pesky linux partitions. I would be careful using fdisk /MBR however, because it could ruin the drive. You might want to look up how to do both of the above since my descriptions were lousey.

fdisk /MBR won't ruin the drive. That simply reinstalls the master boot record and will not cause a drive to be unusable. You may lose data (which if you are deleting the partitions anyway this shouldn't be a concern) but the drive is still usable.

I found a program that you boot from a floppy disk called delpart.exe. This utility will delete a partition with no questions asked. It runs on x86, so you'll need a PC with a floppy drive.

Also, did you try booting from the OS X CD and run Disk Utility from there?