Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I bought a 2nd hand Lenovo ThinkCentre M910s.
I use a remastered slacko64 7.0 (no save file) on thumb drive.

The HDD has 3 partitions ntsf. sda2 is windows 10 (I think) and on sda3 is a big recovery folder of over 400 MB.

My question is the following:
Is it safe to delete the 3 partitions and reformat the HDD. I vaguely remember reading something a few years back, to be careful before reformatting a HDD. If yes, what format should i choose? is ext3 ok.

Any info is appreciated

The warning about partitioning and formatting, is everything on the area of the drive, you are partitioning or formatting, will be deleted.
So be sure you are OK with deleting what is there.

First I need to know if you want only Puppy Linux on the internal drive?

No other operating system will be installed.

Only some version of Puppy Linux?

do you understand how to use Gparted program to do partitions and format them?

@bigpup
I will only use puppy from thumb drive no installation on HDD. I've use Gparted on thumb drive only.
I just want to use the HDD for saving files (movies, music, sfs and pets etc..).

I was worried that bios might be affected.

I do NOT have a Windows 10 computer. I do have a Window 7 Computer and your computer's setup looked very much like my own before I re-structured things.
Your sd1, 50 Mbs with the boot-flag is obviously your boot partition. NEVER Change that.
Your sd3, 500 Mbs MIGHT be a 'recovery partition'. But it seems small for that. Mine was. I copied it to an external drive, then deleted it. I also installed AOMEIBackupperstd and --from time to time-- backup my Windows installation to the same external drive. [I don't know if either would actually enable recovery].
That leaves your sd2, 465 Gbs of which you've used 63 so have 402 Gbs unused.

You computer could have 4 primary partitions. I'd use WINDOWS tools to DEFRAG then Resize>shrink your sd2 (optionally after deleting sd3 with Puppy's gparted). Puppys gparted can then be used to format the now 'unallocated' space.

But as I said. I don't have a Windows 10 computer. Before you do anything, find out the purpose of your sd3 and what tools can be used on Windows 10 to resize partitions. The 'Rule of Thumb' is always use Windows tools to manage hard-drives still under Windows control. Only after they been rendered 'unallocated' should Linux tools be used. Unless, of course, you plan to wipe Windows from the computer.

eddy_norton wrote: ↑Tue Sep 27, 2022 11:18 am

@bigpup
I will only use puppy from thumb drive no installation on HDD. I've use Gparted on thumb drive only.
I just want to use the HDD for saving files (movies, music, sfs and pets etc..).

I was worried that bios might be affected.

I'm no expert technician, but have formatted the hard drive of 7 different windows laptops, including windows 7 and windows 10. I've done it with traditional disk hard drives and ssd drives. Of course you will lose everything on the drive, but it is very possible to format and set up a puppy on the internal drive in addtion to using it as a data drive.

I think two things are of paramount importance, one is to set the bios correctly for your implementation. I've found that what works for me to boot from a partitioned hard drive, is to use gparted to rewrite the allocation table to "msdos." Then format in ext4. From that point you can use the hard drive as a data partition, or if you want to boot from it, the flag can be set. If you are interested in booting from it, the bios needs to be set to legacy boot, and the flag set to match. If you just want to use it for data, that shouldn't be necessary.

So if you just want one big data drive, it should be fine to rewrite the allocation table to msdos and format to ext4. Of course you can setup multiple partitions also. I have often done so in the past, but recently I simply format to one large ext4 partition and install puppy's frugally in folders.

Working with g-parted can be a little frustrating and appear as if the situation is all screwed, but a little patience until the right combination of allocation table, flag, partition, and bios setting has always resulted in success for me, both in booting pups and storing data.

Thank you all for the detailed information. Now I know how to proceed.

Thank you again for saving me the hassle of learning things the hard way.