Kevin,
if you follow the instructions below, you will be able
to use fdisk normally. I will quote verbatim the
instructions from this fellow. They served me well on a
similar problem with a 13GB Maxtor HDD. I don't see why
it should not work with any size HDD.
QUOTE: >>
MBR Wipe Out
Explained by Aryeh Goretsky
The true geek laughs off GUI utilities and goes right
to the heart of the matter. DOS Debug. Have a pesky
NTFS partition that won't go away? LILO still teasing
you after a complete rebuild? No problem. Dive into
this tip for taking care of sticky partition and boot
loader information once and for all. Tread carefully,
however. This one can be unhealthy for your data. Be
sure you really want to blow it away before you
proceed:
Boot from a DOS boot disk with DEBUG on it, and at the
DOS prompt, type in the following, pressing enter at
the end of each line:
DEBUG
RAX
0301
RBX
1000
RCX
1
RDX
80
F100 L200 0
A
INT13
INT3
G
(Press the enter key twice after the INT3 call)
What this does is write nulls over the first sector of
the first hard disk. Normally, you wouldn't want to do
this since it removes the partition table as well, but
it will definitely get rid of LILO, disk BIOS
translation software, etc.
<<END QUOTE
HTH,
Tomas Santos
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
------------------------------
In PCBuild Kevin Neal <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Re:Complete wipe of HDD.
>>Kia Ora,
This question falls into that grey area between
hardware and software,
so I hope that our ListOwners will understand me asking
here first.
I need to know if there is any way of completely wiping
a hard-drive,
ie: returning it to ones and zeros, or binarys, or
whatever.
The reason is because of a failed install of Linux
Mandrake due to
hardware detection problems, - because it didn't
install properly I
can't figure out how to un-install it, even with the
program
documentation.
Using 'fdisk' to delete all DOS and non DOS partitions
got me part of
the way, but of course, now I can't use the recommended
DOS command
'fdisk /mbr. (Master Boot Record) which is where I
suspect the problem
lies.
Any attempt to load or boot anything else gives me a
Mandrake Start
Screen, - and then a 'Kernel panic warning' - something
I've become
familiar with recently, - Wish I hadn't, but will
persevere.
The background to all this is that, thanks in large
part to PCBUILD, I
managed to build one and get it to work well using
W98SE. Not bad for
a truck-driver, - but Windows XP has got right up my
nose and I refuse
to buy it - therefore my interest in Linux.
Then I decided to do a trial install on my old P133
Toshiba laptop, (
figuring that it can always be wiped clean) which is
where the actual
problem lies.
How do I really wipe the laptop HDD?
I look forward to your advice, thoughts or experiences.
Kevin,<<
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