Is there a way to format my hard drives from Suse 7.0. I am trying to install Mandrake 9.2. I know that Mandrake has a utility for that but it does NOT work. All the installs freeze before getting there... My technician is convinced that I loaded Distro's to many time on my hard drive and thats why its not letting me install. I WANT TO DO A LOW LEVEL FORMAT ON MY HARD DRIVES, i do not have internet access on suse 7.0 so i cannot download then directly... Anything I do will have to be burned on a CDRom from WIN XP and then booted up on my Suse 7.0 Machine. My hard drives are a quantum fireball CR 6.0GiG and a 3.4 WD Caviar. Please Help

If you have IDE drives you better not do a low level format if you ever hope to use them again. To format a drive you just run mkfs.<fs> /dev/hdxy where x and y designate drive and partition.

I have probably formatted my drives 200 times and they are still kicking....

what are the common hd designators... like hdb2 ... or what... sorry i am new to this

is there a way to see your hardware and the designators like hd1, hdd2... i feel like i am so close...

type mount and it should print out a list like this:

/dev/hde3 on / type reiserfs (rw,noatime)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw)
none on /dev type devfs (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw)
/dev/hde1 on /boot type reiserfs (rw,noatime,notail)
/dev/hdh1 on /storage type reiserfs (rw,noatime)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
none on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)

Now you can see from this that on my machine
/dev/hde1 is /boot
/dev/hde3 is /
/dev/hdh1 is /storage

If you are wondering where /dev/hde2 went, it happens to be my swap partition.
Of course mount only shows you mounted partitions. Typing dmesg will show you a list of your disk and how many partitions are on it, but you have to wade through it to find the list, because it outputs all the kernel messages.

ok maybe this will help... i have the 3.4 gig on primary master and the 6 gig on primary slave

Ya, but what is your partition layout on those disks?

hda is primary master, hdb is primary slave
hda1 is the first partition on primary master, hda2 is the 2nd partition, and so on.
Same goes for hdb.

Also keep in mind you can't really format your root partition when you are running off it, that could cause problems.

oh ok... well here is where i am ...
bash-2.04# mount
/dev/hdb3 on / type ext2 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
/dev/hdb1 on /boot type ext2 (rw)
usbddevfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw)
bash-2.04# mkfs.<fs> /dev/hdb3
bash: fs: No such file or directory
bash-2.04# mkfs.<fs> /dev/hdb1
bash: fs: No such file or directory
bash-2.04# mkfs.</dev/hdb3>
bash: syntax error near unexpected token 'mkfs. </dev/hdb3'
bash-2.04#

what should should the command be?

ok well I am in root permission when i am doing these commands, should i be somewhere else... please help with command structure =)

oh, sorry, by mkfs.<fs> I ment you need to substitute your file system type for <fs>. Examples are
mkfs.ext2
mkfs.ext3

Only exception is reiserfs which is mkreiserfs

bash-2.04# mkfs.ext2 /dev/hdb3
mke2fs 1.18m 11-Nov-1999 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
/dev/hdb3 is mounted; will not make filesystem here!
bash-2.04#

do i need to login without X interface? then type it?

i guess you cannot format your hard drive from linux... i suppose that makes sense... if you using it... but like in windows... you have dos to do that for you... is there any solution to my formatting problem... or any help with my command structure... or any ideas on how to help would be great....

The MDK installer should be able to repartition and format the hard drive.
Explain the steps you are trying, maybe your just selecting the wrong option.

Go to www.linuxmakdrake.com and read the install documentation.

Yes, you can partition and format from linux but not on a partition that is in use. The best way if your trying to reformat the entire drive is to boot up from a CD or floppy boot disk.

So lets go back and explain what are the errors with installing Mandrake