boot disk question
 

I have been using linux off and on for years and my laptop goes from linux to windows to linux to windows more than any other machine i own

i just switch it back and forth as my needs change and just to try out the new tools

what i really need however is a special boot disk, fdisk gives me SO much trouble formatting and being a pain in the rear, linux install disks have always been my best tools for partition and deleting partitions, they always see the drive and they always have the option to "delete everything", does anybody know of just a linux floppy boot disk that i can use to just clean my drives? it doesn't have to format, it just has to be able to clean out the MBR and the partition table so I can use whatever OS disk I want to install to create a new partition and install from scratch

the biggest trouble is honestly with windows installs, the windows disks don't easily allow me to clean up the drive like linux does, so i'm going to the linux side to see if i can find a tool to clean my drive more easily

thanks alot for any and all help you can give

You could boot up with floppy linux from http://www.toms.net/rb/ . With that you can clean out the boot sector with a command like:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
Also, you can run linux fdisk from there to create or remove partitions.

Sometimes I use a WindowsMe boot floppy with the extras removed. I added a neat partitioning tool from http://www.ranish.com/part/ . This is a very handy tool to have around and it's even encluded on another Very useful tool calledsystem rescue cd and you can get that here. http://www.sysresccd.org/ .