Easiest way to totally wipe my HD's...
 

I'm getting a new dell in the mail within the next few days...i'm looking for the easiest way to just totally erase the HD's and plop on slackware...just run fdisk and kill everything is what i'm planning on doing unless i hear any other suggestions...:study:

If it comes with windows installed or something, and you want to remove everything, the easiest thing would be to just create your partitions in Slack install, and have it reformat everything with the filesystem of your choice. Can't think of why you'd want to do it any other way? :)

yah comes with windows installed...i tried to get it shipped with BLANK hd's but they can't do it for some reason...does slackware enable you to delete ntfs partitions in the setup or do i delete them first and then run the setup?

You can do everything from the Slack installation.

okay so i dont have to even fuck with windows...good...

http://www.windowsrefund.net/
If you never use Windows. Be sure and try to get your money back. I don't know if you will ever see a dime but it might piss MS off, and that can't be a bad thing :)

I don't know if this will apply to you, but a while ago I installed XP Pro for a few hours just to see what it was like. It really sucked (as you might expect, I kept feeling like I was being spied on), but when I went to delete it, it had stolen about 8GB of my 120GB HD as a hidden "partition information" partition. fdisk and cfdisk in the slack installer didn't pick it up and just read that the drive has 8gb smaller than it really is. I had to boot with a windows98 boot disk with delpart.exe from microsoft.com, and delpart could see and delete all the partitions, and then I repartitioned/formatted/installed slack as normal.

Thanks for that a ton! Found lots of good discussion and since i have a dell i CAN get the money back for it as long as i dont agree to their eula... thanks:D :twocents:

that windowsrefund site is awesome

yah, i called dell couldnt get it...i'm not going to sleep until i do though :D i'm doing this for more reasons than i could ever type...

I have a question for you. When you called dell did the person speak english very well?

I am just wondering becuase I had to call them a few months ago about something and they didn't. And I heard that they were going to stop having tech support hosted in other countries

They stopped their support in india...

Yeah that is what I heard. It was a pain to call them and not be able to understand anything. Dell has changed a lot over the past few years they aren't what they used to be. At least they offer RedHat on some of the computers.

During the install, before you run cfdisk or fdisk, you can zero out the MBR with

"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1"

If found that I had to do this if I was installing slackware on a harddrive that already had a MBR, say from a previous Redhat installation. Not sure if this is needed when going over a Windows install.