Repartition my hard drive(s)?

[Ice-9]

This is how my hard drives are partitioned right now:
hda1: 15GB  Win2K  Fat32
hda2: 25GB  Fat32
hdb1: 40GB  NTFS
hdb2: 100MB ext3
hdb3: 35GB  ext3
hdb4: 760MB swap

At first I only had an IBM 40GB drive with 2 patitions on it, when I bought the 80GB WD drive I split the drive in two to have half for Windows and half for Linux and formatted the Win partition in NTFS because of the the limitations of the Fat filesystem for partitions bigger than 32GB.
The remaining 40GB I let Red Hat do it's job and partition automatically.

Now that I'm much more at ease with Linux and boot Windows only to do my online banking now - (my bank requires a software install that doesn't work with Linux so until I find a bank that gives Linux support I'm stuck) - I would like to reformat the NTFS partition to be able to access it from RH, access from Windows isn't necessary.

How would I do that?
Leave all the partitions as they are and reformat the NTFS in ext3?
Make an extended partition?
Use another filesystem like ReiserFS?

Keep in mind that I'm by no means a partitioning pro, I know the basics but that's it    

Thanks.

[voidmain]

Use "fdisk" in Linux to change the partition type of the NTFS partition to type "83" (Linux). Then use "mkfs" to create the linux file system on that partition.

[Ice-9]

Now, just to be sure I don't make mistakes.
I would do the following?
fdisk /dev/hdb1
t
enter the partition number (2 in my case)
Hex code :83
w

right?

after that
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hdb1

and add the entry to /etc/fstab?
not sure about the mkfs thingie .....

[voidmain]

That looks right except it should be "fdisk /dev/hdb" rather than "fdisk /dev/hdb1". And I always use the fdisk "p" command to list the partition table. You can change the type and then press "p" to make sure you changed the right partition before writing it. But looks like you got it. You can optionally add a "-c" to check for bad blocks but it takes longer to format. If you haven't already done so you might want to look over the mke2fs man page if you wanted to use journaling options other than using the defaults (I wouldn't).

[ January 12, 2003: Message edited by: void main ]