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What do you mean exactly by 'wiping'? Do you mean making the data really unrecoverable (by systematically overwriting it) like Norton WipeInfo, or do you just mean deleting the partitions that you can create new ones and format them?

In the latter case, the windows setup disc's partitioning tool is capable of deleting partitions.

cheers Joe

Yeah the later removing all partitions, which in effect should remove all data right?

Then I am going to install windows, then install linux.

I think I may give 4GB to windows, 4GB to linux, and the rest be shared.

Well windows was installed successfully, and so was linux.

2 things to take care of though.

First off, I noticed that when I start the windows loader it lists windows xp twice in the list even though I only have 1 copy of it installed. How do I fix this?

Second, how do I access the home partition I created from within windows?

1) Open Notepad and go File>Open, type "C:\boot.ini" then delete the wrong entry line from the file and resave it.

Alright thanks. Now if I could just get my shared FAT32 partition to work properly.

I created a partition called "/sharedos", and it's now appeared in windows and I was able to write to it from windows.

But in linux, I just don't have proper permission to write. I can only read.

How do I change the partition to be writeable in linux?

Are you sure you are logged in as root, and are you sure it is a FAT32 partition? If you accidentally formatted it with NTFS, then you'll never get proper write access from within linux (because it's not implemented). You could, however, also have set the wrong permissions on the mount point. To give _everyone_ on the system read and write privileges, do:
To mount it with write access (from a console), the following should do it:
IIRC, the vfat driver gives everyone full access to the files and directories inside the FAT32 partition by default. I'll check that...

EDIT: My mistake, it doesn't . And I guess that is your problem. I'm not working with FAT partitions that much ::) any more. You have to declare the privilege settings explicitly when you mount the volume, I have changed the above code line to do that .

cheers Joe

That didn't help. But I did find another way to do it, thanks anyway.

What did you actually do? It's interesting me....

cheers Joe

Well first I logged into the root account, then opened up /etc/fstab and put this at the end of the file:
As you can see I put gid=100 which is the group called "users" of course before it would work I had to assign all accounts into the users group.

Then I ran this on the terminal: And bam, I have a shared fat32 partition that can be written to in linux.

Hmm, strange, when you set the umask to 'rwxrwxrwx' (that's what umask=000 should do) it shouldn't lock out anyone, independant of the group...but anyway, having a group that has access to the disk is more secure anyway, and definitely preferred.

Btw: looking at your avatar(s): do you like Mega Man games?

cheers Joe

Yes I do. Especially mega man x games. I can't wait till the mega man x collection comes out. It's going to have mega man x through mega man x 6 on one disc and some mega man games that where never released in the USA.