damned linux

[Psilaxs]

No this isnt in the wrong area,

I recently installed mandrake 9.0 needlessto say i want to get rid of it lol. I formated one of my emtpy drives to take linux (The whole 40 gigs, well 5.33 gigs then 200 and some for swap file and the remaining 33 gigs) anyway, i need to know of some tools that can render this drive usefull again for windows, i want to format it back to ntfs. I know i could boot the winXP cd rom and do it from there, but since it is divided into 3 partitions (I really dislike linux) i want a program that will wipe the entire drive clean and and make it it one big ol' ntfs volume.

And before someone says PArtition Magic, I tried that, it semi recognizes the linux partition, but will not re-format or convert this drive.

BEST Regards,
Psilaxs

[zaphodiv]

Boot to a linux root prompt
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdx
where hdx is the harddrive you want to wipe (/dev/hda is primary master /dev/hdb is secondary master etc

Alternativly just delete the partitons with fdisk, personally I use linux fdisk because dos fdisk is braindead and crashes on big disks. You can do fdisk /mbr (undocumented switch) to remove a bootloader installed in the mbr.

[Psilaxs]

OK, well i have my dilema partially solved, I downloaded paragon Partition tools (The free demo version was actually FUNCTIONAL!!) and got both of the partitions formated to ntfs, now, when i use Partition Magic to merge them, it says that there are no partitions on this drive that can be merged. Funny, windows recognizes them. Perhaps this is due in part to the small 200 some odd partition that is left from linux, i will format this to ntfs also and have another go, Thank you for your help
zaphodiv

*EDIT* ok problem is all taken care of. I will not give details but will say it was a pain in the ass to finally get my 40 gig back to being functional :D 1 big fat hdd im happy