On Sunday 01 February 2004 1:05 pm, wmeler wrote:

Is there a way to just ERASE the hard drive completely (and allow SuSE to repartition it, etc.) so that when I insert the installation CDs everything will start from scratch? (Right now, when I try to install, things do not go well at all. It complains about some shared objects and gives a "segmentation fault.")

If you really, really want to erase the hard drive, I recommend using the floppy-based PowerMax utility you can download from maxtor.com. Among other things, it can do a low-level reformat of the drive, and since the software is coming from the people who make the drives, you can pretty well trust it to do a good job. PowerMax also has some excellent nondesctructive diagnostics. It's a program I recommend at every opportunity -- and it's free! Paul Abrahams

You can format partitions during installation. :) Jota On Sunday 01 February 2004 15:05, wmeler wrote:

Is there a way to just ERASE the hard drive completely (and allow SuSE to repartition it, etc.) so that when I insert the installation CDs everything will start from scratch? (Right now, when I try to install, things do not go well at all. It complains about some shared objects and gives a "segmentation fault.")

Tom

-----Original Message----- From: Per Jessen Sent: Feb 1, 2004 9:30 AM To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] How do I format the hard drive in Linux?

John Lamb wrote:

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wmeler wrote:

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From a command line, how do I format the hard drive?

Look at the man pages for fdisk and mkfs. These need to be run as root with great care.

You will also want to consider which filesystem you will want to format. See the "-t" option for mkfs.

/Per Jessen, Zurich

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Cheers, wmeler

wmeler wrote:

Is there a way to just ERASE the hard drive completely (and allow SuSE to repartition it, etc.) so that when I insert the installation CDs everything will start from scratch? (Right now, when I try to install, things do not go well at all. It complains about some shared objects and gives a "segmentation fault.")

You could just remove all the partitions with fdisk, then the installation program will see only an empty drive.