On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 08:40:45PM +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote: > On 6/23/05, M A Young <m.a.young@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Thu, 23 Jun 2005, Dotan Cohen wrote: > > > > I think that I managed to format the entire drive in fdisk, but the > problem persists. I thought that I had erased hda2, but it still > complains. fdisk does not format drives. > > What is the fool-proof way of formating an old hard disk before install? You should not need to format (low level format, i.e. lay down track and sector information on the medium) your hard drive. Ever. What you probaably want to do is clobber the partition table so you can start over. * Use fdisk and delete one partition at a time untill you've deleted all of them. * Use dd to write 0s to the partition table. Something like this should do it: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=2 ; sync Do this from some other linux, like a floppy distribution (e.g. tomsrtbt) or a live CD distribution. -- Charles Curley /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign Looking for fine software \ / Respect for open standards and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email http://www.charlescurley.com / \ No M$ Word docs in email Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB
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