Please forgive me if this has already been asked before, I spent some time this afternoon trying to find out the answer to the problem myself before I thought of coming here.

Anyway, I recently installed FC3 on my old laptop for a bit of fun. This was my first time, ever, trying linux, so i'm still mucking around a bit and finding out how things work.

So, since my laptop is really old (Toshiba Satellite 4000CDT), and since FC3 obviously doesn't work properly. I want to change to Mandrake. How can i re-format my hard-disk in linux? I have no idea how.

Hi friend. i think that mandrake offers you the posibility to erase and format your hd at the installation process, so you dont have to think about delete your old distro.
Anyway you are having fun with your old laptop, maybe you can try this option.

ok, thank you for your help, i'll try that

Hello,

Given that your hardware is fairly old, you might find that Mandrake doesn't offer any improvement. Both Fedora and Mandrake, not to mention many of the other 'big' distros, make reasonable demands on hardware - and from experience, you really need 128MB RAM as a minimum for anything that runs KDE / Gnome...

What is the spec of the machine?

Toshiba 4000CTD:

160MB RAM (does't sound right, but that's what it says)
i think about 4GB HDD
Intel PII CPU

I can't be too sure, but thats about right.

Hi,

OK, Mandrake should be installable, but it won't be exactly quick.. I'm guessing from the Pentium II processor it'll be running at anything between 233 and 300MHz. 160MB RAM is above the bare minimum, but I think you'll still end up with memory disk-swapping, which will obviously drop speed..

Have a go with Mandrake, but I'm thinking you might actually see worse performance than you would with, say, Windows 95 / 98, at least if you try to run KDE..

An alternative might be to look at Debian 3.0 (Woody), running KDE 2. It's not as pretty as KDE 3, but I think you'd find it better than Mandrake performance-wise. I've tried this on an old iMac, with just 64MB RAM, and performance was just about OK.. Debian is trickier to install than Mandrake, but you might want to look at it as a learning experience!

Ok, well i'll take all of this into account. I already have Mandrake on a dvd, i just need to burn the files to some CDs to create the installation disks.

Debian sounds good. looks like i've got some research to do.

thanks all.