I recently redeveloped an interest in using Linux after a 10 years away. What I need here is help clearing off the system to do a clean install. The system I have is one I inherited so no need to worry about losing any data on it.
I tried several disrto's and now have the patitions off kilter from the installs. I need to wipe GRUB off the MBR anf format both drives. I installed Ubuntu 12.10 and want to install Fedora 18 --since years ago I was a big fan of Red Hat.


Thank you

Hi,

the Fedora installer will take care of wiping/formatting the drives: you won't need to do anything special.

Cheers,

Evo2.

As above, the installer will take care of that for you.
Incidentally, Fedora is now RedHat's R&D distro, so very up to date, but can be unstable and new versions coming out very frequently.
If you want a free version of RH's Enterprise Linux aka RHEL, try Centos.
Latest is 6.4.

See the various wikipedia articles.

1 members found this post helpful.

Sorry I should have given more details. I installed Ubuntu 12.10 and even after the fedora 18 install afterwards it does not boot up and is not seeing all of my drive space.Only Unintu boots and cannot see the fedora installed thru anaconda. My thought was to wipe both hard drives clean and install clean, I should also mention my main system has a good install of win 7 pro and Ubuntu 12.10 ,other than sluggish cd rom OS,s works really well.
Your assistance is greatly appreciated

I'm confused by your term "clean install". Do you mean you want to remove Win 7 as well? Or do you want to keep it?
jdk

The machine I want to wipe has only Linux on it .Not being very experienced with linux I have goofed up this system with installs of different distro,s so I want to clear the machine mbr and all and start from scratch with Fedora 18. My Win7/Ubuntu 12.10 machine works perfectly.
Thank you

It might be helpful to give some hardware details of your target system, as very old systems may have install issues (e.g. graphics). I have noticed that some of the distros' installers do not always give an option to reformat/wipe etc. the hard drives but assume you have no room... just my experience. So, boot a live CD distro, wipe the drives after that do the install distro option.

You might try Ultimate Boot CD it has a tool for most anything.

Your Live CD of Unbuntu should have Gparted on it.

It may be in UBCD, but here is a link to DBAN.

Boot the live cd of ubunutu and open the partition manager. Then delete the partitions. Then do your install. That'll clean her up.

I would recommend either Debian Stable or CentOS if the computer is old- both are stable and more likely to support older hardware.
When you install, choose to manually partition the HDD, and delete all the existing partitions. That will ensure your system is the only one on the machine.

Hi,

are you saying that you can't boot from an install CD or USB stick, and instead it just boots into Ubuntu? If that is the case, the you probably just need to change the boot deive order in the bios. If not can you please provide more information on what the current situation is, and what state you want the machine to be in? You talk about wiping the mbr, but it is not clear to me why you want to do this.

Evo2.

Simply stated the installs are not wanted to be kept I want to format and start from scratch this is a project box I do not need to preserve anything on it then I will put an install of fedora 18

---------- Post added 04-24-13 at 05:52 PM ----------

I tried to install over the Ubuntu and did not work

When installing Ubuntu you want "Use Entire Disk" and I think other distros have a similar option. Otherwise the automatic install will do so to free space (and reduce another partition if necessary). I think there's a "use entire partition" option too which, as it says, just uses one partition.
As mentioned above, if you're in any doubt then use the manual partitioning in the installer and remove the partitions yourself before continuing.

Hi,
Ok.

Ok, so this is your problem. What do you mean by "didn't work"? What did you do? What happened?
Eg you did;

1. Download installer image from http://blah.com/foo/XX/fedora-something.iso
2. Download md5sum file from from http://blah.com/foo/XX/fedora-something.md5
3. Check md5sum of iso file...
4. Burn iso file to cd, using: burn -I fedora-something.iso
5. Put cd inmachine, boot into installer
6. Select, language, keyboard, etc
7. partition disk
8. And so on

Evo2.

Fedora is well known to not work/install/or work well on old hardware
some oldish hardware fedora 18 will run fine on

without knowing the hardware specs ? i can not say .

Now,the ubuntu 12.10 install DVD ( not a live cd ) will have no problems reformatting the drives

but i like to use GParted live cd to reformat . ( my own personal like so ... )
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

so use the bit older version for now "GParted Live 0.14.1-6"

blank the drives
as in remove the partitions and do not reformat

or if you want to do a custom install
this is what i do
reformat to something like this
---for one harddrive ---
BUT
if you use gparted to set up the drive you MUST do a "custom" and MANUAL install using the ubuntu dvd


or just blank the drive
pop in the ubunbtu dvd
and let it auto set up the system