On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Dave hardy wrote:
> I managed to blow away LILO but am having trouble reformatting the drive;
> I tried it from the DOS shell ...
MS FDISK is incredibly brain damaged, and frequently hides information. In
particular, it refuses to delete non-DOS partitions.
> ... and also using Partition Magic which clearly displays the half dozen
> or so partitions I have with RH but will only allow me to format the Win32
> partition of 40MB ...
Delete the Linux partitions first.
> I must be missing something really basic and stupid here;
I wouldn't go that far; partitioning on PCs is something of a black art.
> ... does anyone have a quick and easy way for me to reformat the drive and
> put it into WinDoze Purgatory?
If one wants to start from scratch on a particular disk, it is sometimes
desirable to zero the disk first. This is how I typically do so (replace
"hda" with whatever disk drive you want to zero):
1. Boot the Red Hat Linux CD in "rescue" mode.
2. Wait for the shell prompt (#) to appear.
3. Do "mknod /dev/hda".
4. Do "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024 bc=1".
5. Do "sync".
6. Reboot, and do whatever you were planning on doing...
WARNING: The above will DESTROY ALL DATA on the disk! USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Net Technologies, Inc. <http://www.ntisys.com>
Voice: (800)905-3049 x18 Fax: (978)499-7839
**********************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the
*body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter:
unsubscribe gnhlug
**********************************************************
