On Sunday 16 May 2010 3:27:19 Karljurgen Feuerherm wrote:
> I've tried various things, such as deleting partitions, reinstalling
> windows and then reinstalling plan9... but I always seem to end up with
> some residual stuff (e.g. the users I created the last time around are
> still there...!)
> 

I can confirm this behavior.  I've seen it many times during my own
repeated installations of plan 9.  Somehow, the plan9-created 
partitions/slices are remarkably "sticky"... The data manages to
linger even after deleting and recreating the partition table, and
even after reformatting said new partitions with, say, reiserfs or
ext2/3 from linux.

I found that in order to guarantee an absolute _clean_ re-install of
plan 9, I need to:

* boot into linux w/ a rescue cd
* run 'shred' on the previous plan9-created partition
* delete the partition(s)
* clear the previous plan9-installed MBR with:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

... otherwise... the next re-install of plan 9 ends up with data from
the previous install.

This is highly annoying and time-consuming, especially when doing
repeated re-installs for whatever reasons.


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