format and reinstall the system
 

Hey there
I would like from someone to tell me how can I reinstall BackTrack .I am having a problem with my system and i want to reinstall it from LiveCD. What exactly i want is a completely format of the whole system first and reinstallation later.
Any ideas?

so you want to format the hardrive and then install? you should be able to do that just off of the live cd when it asks you how you want to partition. Just say you want this much of the drive to be the main thing and that much to be swap and it should get rid of everything without complaint.

What I recommend in preparing a HDD for a fresh install is to wipe the drive (write 0's across it), which is probably what you are after. Formatting does not wipe a drive but just sets up the filesystem directories (more or less) to help find things on the drive later. You can probably use dd from the Live CD to do this, but I do not use dd, I use another product to do this (my boot manager for multi-boot system). Here is a link to an article on using dd, it will tell you how to do that.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=362506

Hey again!!!
Thanks very much both of you for your replies.
I found http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=362506
really helpful but i am quite newbie and i dont really know if i can manage to do to this on my own
So what i have to do is to boot from LiveCD and then
I currently have one partition and i am wondering if this will work

Thanks for your time

Backtrack is a Slax. The Slax installer by default will format the partition.

Thus by telling Backtrack installer that you want it install at the same partition as the existing Backtrack then all your problems should disappear automatically.

Dear saikee
I have thought the same and also have tried it but unfortunately i have the same problem with my eth0.
When i first installed BackTrack everything was fine and one day all of a sudden my eth0 was down
with 2 errors. Only lo was up.
So i decided to reinstall my BackTrack. I boot from the LiveCD and i installed it but when i rebooted the machine i noticed that my previous user account was still in home directory (locked)
I removed it recursively just to ensure that i dont have anything from the past.
Any ideas what could cause the problem?

In the article, this is what he/she wrote:
Wipe a hard drive of all data (you would want to boot from a cd to do this) http://www.efense.com/helix
is a good boot cd The helix boot environment contains the DoD version of dd called dcfldd. It works the same way, but is has a progress bar.

dcfldd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda conv=notrunc

They mention getting a different CD called Helix, as far as I can tell the only difference is that the Helix CD has a progress bar to let you see what's happening as it will not happen in a flash depending on what kind of hardware you have and the size of the partition. If /dev/sda2 is the /home partition you want to wipe than the dd command should look like this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda2 conv=notrunc

You will probably have to wait till the prompt comes back before doing anything else, as I mentioned, I have not used dd but according to the article, this is how to write 0's across the second partition presumably /home on a SATA HDD. To do the entire drive, remove the (2) next to sda.

You can also keep existing partitions and just tell the installer to re-format the partition, all original data will still be there but should not affect the new installation if the partition was re-formatted, if you did not specify during installation the second time, it is likely the installer saw that it was formatted and did not re-format. But it is better to give the partition a quick wipe, then it will have to be re-formatted during installation or before with gparted or equivalent.

If you use DHCP via the ethernet port then Slax has a terminal command
good enough to kick start it when it is down.

Just did it myself with Backtrack.