On Sun, 2006-09-24 at 21:12 -0700, Jimbo wrote: > Greetings: > I decided to reinstall due to major system faults that I didn't know how to > recover from. I have been dabbling with different distros for a solid month > now. Partitioning is new and dangerous territory for me but I'm not afraid > of living dangerously. > > Found a very cool and lightweight partitioning live cd > http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php that uses gnome.
I'm not sure about the 21st century partitioning tools; however, the 20th century tools still work for me. <snip> > Is it that data doesn't get erased until written over or does the boot > loader, and other files, reside someplace else? Is there a good way to > completly remove all data, boot loaders included? Does installing a new OS > overwrite all info if all space is used? I was quite shocked to see my > little dog covering my screen when I thought I deleted all info! > I use fdisk (not the DOS version), mkfs, and mkswap to create and change Linux filesystems. Here's a rough session: # fdisk /dev/hda Command (m for help): p <-- prints the partition table for fun Here's a copy of my partition table: Disk /dev/hda: 123.5 GB, 123522416640 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 15017 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 14679 117909036 83 Linux /dev/hda2 14680 15017 2714985 5 Extended /dev/hda5 14680 15017 2714953+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris Command (m for help): n <-- new partition Command action: p <-- primary partition (1-4) <-- for simplicity, use only three partitions. Partition number(1-4): 1 <-- this'll create /dev/hda1 Then set the beginning and ending block numbers and set the file system ID to: 83) Linux partition or 82) Linux swap When finished: Command (m for help): w <-- writes the partition table Command (m for help): q <-- quits fdisk Note: this only created the partition table. It did not format your partitions. To format partitions, use mkfs and mkswap. For mkfs, use -t ext3 to create an ext3 filesystem: # mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hda1 To create the swap partition: # mkswap /dev/hda2 Then you have to make the proper entries in /etc/fstab so the boot process will mount things correctly. Here's my /etc/fstab file: # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1 /dev/hdb1 /hdb1 ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1 /dev/hda5 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0 /dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0 <snip> _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
