can not reformat hdd after failed ubuntu install (no filesystem)
 

I tried to install ubuntu and botched the install, well now I'm left with a hard drive that is seen as a physical drive (shows up on desktop in knoppix 4) but I can not mount it.

Also I tried to cfdisk it and it would not show up there.


Can anyone help?

Hi,

does the drive show in bios?

Hard drive manufacturers often have a utility for low level formating theirs drives, more than likely to run in DOS. Also theres a boot CD floating round "Hirens boot CD" which includes a lot of these drive tools.


And just to make sure, when using cfdisk you do put the device with it. eg: "cfdisk /dev/hdb".

Does knoppix come with qtparted?, Ive never used it but looks like a nice tool.

Im no linux guru, so hang around for more suggestions.

knoppix does have qtparted. start a terminal window, type su <enter> qtparted <enter>.
You should be able to make one big partition, your Ubuntu setup will then probably change that.

plain old 'fdisk /dev/hda' would do the job too, just delete all the partitions and start again :)