Wiping the HD
 

Hello,

I am a new user in Linux.

I am currently running Debian.

Unfortunately, I would like to completely wipe the Hard Disk and reinstall both VISTA and DEBIAN on two diffrent partitions of the HD.

I have tried:

root

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fda


I was hoping to wipe the HD this way but it did not work.

Any ideas or utlities which I can use.

Nevica

Boot from a live CD.

Wipe and re-create partitions using fdisk

reformat and boom you are back to scratch.
Example:

mke2fs /dev/sda1
mke2fs -j /dev/sda3
mkswap /dev/sda2 && swapon /dev/sda2

Now you are ready to reinstall your Distro and then Vista.
-weisso

It should have worked, but I have a question about the command you used.
/dev/fda? I've not seen that one before. Look into /etc/fstab, or run 'fdisk -l' to find out what your system calls the hard drive. Then correct the dd command.

????
 

I am trying 'fdisk -l' in a terminal but this does not work.

Any ideas..............

Fdisk may not be in your PATH environment variable. So, try the full path to the executable called fdisk. Like this: /sbin/fdisk -l.

Side note: if you intend to try to re-make your partitions, you must do it from a liveCD. You shouldn't try re-making partitions from a mounted partition. That is, if the partition yout OS is running from is one of the partitions you intend to work on. Your work should involve unmounted partitions. Also, you need root authority to do it.

I might be missing something but:

/sbin/fdisk -l

gets no response.

I am sorry to be such a pain but I am a beginner.

NEVICA

I tried
 

I tried:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

and got the response:


dd: writing to `/dev/hda': No space left on device
1+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 0.000349603 seconds, 0.0 kB/s

I also tried:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fda

and got the response

dd: writing to `/dev/fda': No space left on device
20249+0 records in
20248+0 records out
10366976 bytes (10 MB) copied, 0.0274376 seconds, 378 MB/s

Any ideas?

It would help to know more about your computer: make, model, hardware (especially hard drive vendor and disk size).

Fdisk may not be in /sbin on your system. So, in a terminal, run 'locate fdisk' to find out where the fdisk executable is located. Then use the path given to you in the locate results to run the command. Example: suppose locate finds it in /usr/sbin/fdisk. Then you would run the command as '/usr/sbin/fdisk -l'.