Formating an NTFS bootable partition

[cdevers at pobox.com (Chris Devers)]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Al wrote:

> Is there any easy way of formatting D and getting rid of the bootup
> selection menu aside from using software such as Partition Magic?

Most Linux installers will offer to do both of these for you.

If you just need to fix the boot selection thing, you can edit your
C:\boot.ini file so that the timeout line is set to zero:

    [boot loader]
 -> timeout=0
    default=multi(0) disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
    [operating systems]
    multi(0) disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="WinXP Pro C" /fastdetect
    multi(0) disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="WinXP Pro D" 

The default should be 30, which is about 30 seconds longer than you want. 

Windows will also let you reformat, but only as NTFS or FAT32 or similar,
which won't really help you; let the Linux installer do that part. For
that matter, the Linux installer can probably fix the boot loader too by
installing either Lilo or Grub. 


-- 
Chris Devers