New hard drive
 

I have a hard drive that I used to have for windows and im thinking of using dban to wipe it clean including the mbr. Now my question is after wiping it with dban could I go stright and install Linux on it, or would I need to do something before I could install a distribuion onto it?

Would I need to create the mbr for grub to go into, or would the distributions installer create the mbr for me along with formating the disk and creating the needed partitions if no mbr section was present?

Thaks in advance

Michael.

Most installers will help you partition the hard-drive and take care of the mbr. It is a good idea to set aside around 512mb for swap drive and I prefer to have a separate /home partition also so I can install a different or upgraded system without touching my /home.

So the installer will actually create the area on the hard drive that the mbr is located in. I just was not sure wether I would atually need to create that area, or if the distro would see there was no mbr area present when it asked me to installer the bootloader there and then actually create the mbr area.

The MBR is the first 446 bytes of sector 1. The partitioning program will write the partition table, which is part of the MBR, and the bootstrap code will be added by grub. So, wipe the drive. You are safe to do this.