Another FC4 installation problem

[Dotan Cohen]

On 6/24/05, Charles Curley <charlescurley at charlescurley.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 08:40:45PM +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > On 6/23/05, M A Young <m.a.young at durham.ac.uk> 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
> 

Thanks. I managed to do it in qtparted with knoppix, but I will
certainly remember your advise for next time. I´m man dd now...

Dotan
http://lyricslist.com/lyrics/artist_albums/457/spears_britney.php
Britney Spears Lyrics