I though this was going to be easy ...

[wsdhnet]

I have 2 HDs. One is Win98 with 2 partitions. The other is my old Win HD which I want to configure for RH6. I installed the second HD in my computer and set it up as a secondary master and when windoze boots it recognizes the second drive and assigns the drive letters. What I want to do is to remove the partitions on the second drive so I can install Red Hat. But for some reason, I can't seem to get rid of them. I tried Disk Druid and fdisk, but they won't go away. In fdisk under DOS I get an error message saying the disk cannot be locked and the process aborts. If I try to reformat the drive, it comes back and says the drive is in use by another process.

I guess I should just build a second system and use two computers but I would really like to get this to work.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance,

John

[NDC]

You are getting that message because the drive is "locked". You can "unlock" the drive by typing lock at the DOS prompt and answering y for yes. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

EX:

E:\>lock

Note: Remember that the drive stays unlocked only for the current session when you type the "lock" command. The drive will be locked back up when you reboot the system.

[This message has been edited by NDC (edited 11-18-2000).]

[wsdhnet]

Thanks for that info. When I do type lock at the prompt it wants to write to the b: of which I don't have and then writes to the a: drive.

When I go back to fdisk, I get the same message that the drive could not be locked.

John

[NDC]

That's probably beacuse you are typing lock at the A: prompt. try typing at the prompt of the drive letter you are trying to unlock.

[wsdhnet]

No, I'm at the drive I want to change. When I type 'unlock' it goes through the same process and seems to finish, but when going to fdisk it says 'can't change partitions the drive cannot be locked'.

Now when I type d:\>lock d: I get a 'locking operation failed'. Same thing when typing d: unlock.

[This message has been edited by wsdhnet (edited 11-18-2000).]

[NDC]

No don't type the command like that, don't put a drive letter after you type LOCK.

Type exactly as shown below at the DOS prompt:

LOCK

And, BTW, strangly, the commands mean the opposite of what you type.

lock = unlock
unlock = lock




[This message has been edited by NDC (edited 11-18-2000).]

[wsdhnet]

I tried that too, still no go. No matter what I do, I still get the same message in fdisk.

Where's that big magnet .....

[-VictoryFleet-]

Try this:
1) Restart Computer
2) As soon as the message that says Starting Windows 95/98/NT/ME/ect..., press F8 on your keyboard. Then press the number for the option:
Command Prompt Only
and hit enter. Type in the lines (always hit enter after each line):
c:
cd\windows\command
fdisk

That should work(bring up fdisk). If not, type in lock in your DOS prompt (under that drive, of course).

[wsdhnet]

OK, here is what I did to get this to work.

1. Deleted all the files on the disk. Since this was at one time my primary drive and still had all the files on it, I thought there might be some kind of conflict. Who knows?

2. Rebooted and went to command line, brought up fdisk, deleted the partitions with no problems!

Thanks for the help, now to figure out installing Red Hat!

John