The Answer Guy

help....need to delete a linux partition

From Mark Dellaquila on Mon, 12 Jun 2000

Jim-

Is there any possible way to delete all linux partitions? I want to get

rid of them and reinstall the Mandrake Linux 7.0. Any help would be great. Thanks!

Mark Dellaquila

Boot into Linux (preferably using a rescue diskette or CD; possibly using Mandrake's installation CD and switching to VC 2 (the second virtual console on most Linux installation packages is a command prompt).

Then, for each drive you can run fdisk -l like:

	fdisk -l /dev/hda
	fdisk -l /dev/hdb
	fdisk -l /dev/sda

... etc.

Look for Linux and Linux Swap partitions in each of these listings. On any of them that list a Linux or Linux Swap partition, run fdisk in interactive mode (just leave out the -l option), and delete those partitions.

If you want to wipe out a whole drive (e.g. you don't have any non-Linux stuff on it that you wish to preserve) you can use the 'dd' command with script zeros over all of it, or just the MBR. Here's a couple of example commands:

      dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda count=1 bs=512  ## just wipe the MBR
      dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda	          ## blank everything!

... that's basically all there is to it.

Copyright © 2000, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 55 July 2000

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