Parted Not Found

[trev.saunders at gmail.com]

Hi,

> I can afford losing the partition. I have an image of it. Plus this computer
> has no screen nor keyboard. It is my testing machine.

ok, unless you want to have fun fiddling with ntfs resize and parted I'd say re partition the disk and forget about the ntfs partition.  What I'd do is figure out how you'd ideally layout partition sizes, and use parted to set up the partition table according to you wishes, then once linux is installed, you can copy the windows image onto the desired partition.

FIrst to clear the old partition table just use rm with each partition you want to remove, then use create, and mkfs to make filesystems.

> What I found interesting is that you told me to leave the rest
> unpartitioned. Does that mean ArchLinux would create a primary partition
> upon installation?

I can't speak to the arch installer, but yes, when you went to install linux you'd be able to partition the free space as you liked.
 
> Secondly, since it is a pain to take the hard drive out and hook it
> externally to my other machine, is it possible to wipe the hard drive using
> parted? I can then create a blank partition and throw the Windows image on
> it. I assume RM 2 would delete it.
> 

yes, as above rm will delete the given partition.  then just setup the new partitioning scheme as you like, and copy the windows image.
It doesn't really matter here, but fyi unless you specifically ask it to parted won't touch the data on the drive, it'll just change the partition table that says were partitions start.  If you want to have some fun, I've seen this work, you can remove a partition from the table, and then put it back in the partition table and you'r data is still ok.  Noe though that actually destroying the data on the disk does trully destroy the data.


HTH
Trev