Andrew McMillan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Tue, 2002-04-16 at 08:57, Nick wrote: > > I need to uninstall Debian so I can reinstall from scratch, how can I > > uninstall everything. > > I've _always_ wanted to say to someone to just: > > su > rm -rf /
Personally, I prefer one of # shred /dev/hda # you'll wipe Win-DoS too if installed # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda # dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda to really scrub the hard disk clean, but they can take quite a bit of time with large disks. They really get rid of your data (especially when using shred, see `man shred`) which is usually a good idea when you plan to junk/sell/give away your machine. If you want to keep Win-DoS, just loop over the /dev/hda* devices that you want to clear and skip the ones you want to keep. > And finally it is halfway reasonable advice! :-) > > Seriously, do an 'fdisk -l /dev/hda' and a 'df' to see what your > partitions are at the moment and where they are mounted. Save that > information. > > Use 'cfdisk /dev/hda' and delete the partitions that have Debian on > them. You can do that during the reinstall. Just switch to the second virtual terminal with ALT+F2 and you have a shell where you can do these basic things directly or go down the installer's menu to (re) partition the hard disk. > Reboot from your Debian installation media (CD, preferably) and you > will be able to do a completely clean install of Debian. > > On the other hand this is kind of a strange request. Very few > situations require a complete reinstall, and you should even be able > to do a reinstall over the top of the existing install, but it could > potentially be messy - the approach above will end up with a > completely clean system, but means losing your data files (under > Debian - your windows ones should be OK). Sometimes it's easier to just reinstall the whole bunch (although you may want to keep /home -> put it on a separate partition to do that!). It's probably also a good idea to backup /etc before going ahead. It may come in handy later when (re)configuring stuff. -- Olaf Meeuwissen Epson Kowa Corporation, CID GnuPG key: 6BE37D90/AB6B 0D1F 99E7 1BF5 EB97 976A 16C7 F27D 6BE3 7D90 LPIC-2 -- I hack, therefore I am -- BOFH -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
