how to delete disc partitions

[knewbie]

Hi,I have Kubuntu 7.04 installed.How can I safely remove unwanted disc partitions created during aborted/unsuccessful upgrades and installation.Thank you,Peter.

[kevinc]

Re: how to delete disc partitions

Welcome, Peter.

Try this: http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=197.0

and this: http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3099811.0 see #5 and maybe others too.

Usually upgrades don't create extra partitions. How many partitions do you have?
How many do you want?

Recommended partitions: /, /home, swap (three)
depending on what you do you may want others such as /var, /boot,
also, depending on dual or multi booting, you may want more.
I have eight for two distros of Kubuntu.

[knewbie]

Re: how to delete disc partitions

Thank you Kevinc,I thought I only needed two,one for kubuntu and one for the swap file.I installed kubuntu 7.04 to the whole disc replacing windows xp.I then attempted to upgrade to 8.04 from a disc sent to me by Canonical which failed for some reason after partitioning the disc.Nothing now worked so I reinstalled 7.04.I then had one more unsuccessful attempt at upgrading to 8.04.I now have seven partitions:#1 34.6 gb ,#2 1gb ,#3 17.5gb enabled #5 3.1gb #6 1.6gb enabled #7 17gb #8 800.1mb.I assume I only need the two enabled partitions and would like to delete the others to free up disc space.Am I correct and if I am ,how do I go about it.I would like to upgrade to the latest version of kubuntu when I have sorted the disc out.Thanks in advance for your advice,Peter.

[E_Debois]

Re: how to delete disc partitions

sudo cfdisk /dev/sda
for sata/scsi disks or
sudo cfdisk /dev/hda
for IDE

Up/Down arrow selects partition, left/right selects command. The changes are not actually committed until you select to write them to the disk.

Careful though, think things through before you overwrite the partition table.

[kevinc]

Re: how to delete disc partitions

Deleting a partition only does not automatically do anything other than deleting a partition. You are correct, you will have free, unpartitioned space on your disk. If for example, you deleted partitions five, six, seven and eight, you would have three primary partitions and one logical partition which could also be deleted. To use the space you then need to resize an existing partition, or, in your case as you want to do a fresh install, delete all partitions and make three new partitions.

This can be safely done either with an installed Kubuntu or running Kubuntu as a live CD.

If you have Jaunty Jackalope, try running it as a live CD, then do the following
1 - work out how many partitions you want and what size, eg / - 50G, /home - 20G, swap 2G
2 - delete current partitions and create the new partitions
3 - install Jaunty and then select for example partition one - root, partition two - home, and partition three - swap

Read the references, that will help you understand what you are doing. Hope this helps.

[kevinc]

Re: how to delete disc partitions

Oops. Sorry, there is a simpler way.

You want to remove your existing eight partitions and install Jaunty.

Easiest way is simply to install Jaunty and it will do all of this exactly as you want.
Usually you have three options for partition -
1 guided - using one existing partition
2 guided - using the whole disk - this is what you want
3 manual - this is what I usually use so that I can select the mount point for each existing partition

In you case, the best option will be automatic using the whole disk. Two ways to do this,
1 run Jaunty as a live CD and install from the live CD
2 install direct without running it as a CD