Thank you for your welcome mail, in fact since i joined i have been supprised by the activity. This being the first mailing list i have joined.
Whilst not completely to new to computing i started playing around with the Acorn Electron ( perhaps a blast from the past). Then came a break for a few years. i started again in 1994 and have been using the dare i say it, the microsoft system.
I had read a lot about Linux and started to get a hankering to try it out.
My son who had recently installed Linux on his computer, The Mandrake 7.1 variation. Gave me a copy as a present.
 
Due to pressure of work i have not yet had time to get really into it although i have read and purchased a number of books on elementary Linux. I could not hack it in 24 Hours as the title of one book suggested.
Here i am a newboy or not so new really, wishing to learn something about the system.
Without pushing my luck on the length of correspondence allowed could one of you learned gentlemen help.
 
My system recently got its knickers in a twist so i decided to format the hard drive and start again, something i have done in the past. What is did not even think about at the time was that i would lose contact with my Linux partition. The system was dual booted via GRUB so i could either go into Windows or Linux. Now i can only get into windows which is not what i want.
How can i format all of my hard drive and repartition the drive to enable me to reinstall Linux.
 
Colin Davis