How to reformat HD?
Submitted by michaelgraaf on Mon, 07/06/2009 - 08:13.
A friend allowed me to convert his XP box to dual-boot Jaunty. It worked except that some packages weren't fetched in the post-install restricted driver download. After using for a while, fine except no audio, I tried to reinstall Jaunty, and it aborted due to failure to create a swap partition. Thereafter nothing would boot.
Between us we tried using supergrub disk, then gparted and now rescue remix(incl testdisk). We have got to the point where all he wants is to clean the disk and reinstall XP but even that is now aborting when it gets to partition choice (it detects the partitions as they were prior to gparted claiming to have deleted them).
Surely rescue remix should enable a clean wipe?
It sounds like a mess. I
It sounds like a mess. I would suspect hardware problems with the drive.
But if you want to wipe the partition table, there are many ways to do it.
You could use dd to write zeros to the first block:
(Make sure sda is the proper device!)
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
You can use cfdisk to delete the partitions and write the empty partition table to the drive:
sudo cfdisk /dev/sda
You can use parted, fdisk, etc....