Well so it happens that i need to wipe my whole hard drive + MBR, so I was wondering if you more experienced guys can recommend me a tool or utility you use to perform such tasks. I run, maybe worth mentioning Fedora #4.
...
+MBR i wrote becuase thats where i see (maybe i see wrongly) my problem installing fresh win XP wich i need for one project. When i boot from cd-rom, win installation says "Setup is inspecting your configuration", and nothing happens afterwards, except black screen, and thats it. Either way i dont need to wipe my disk just for that, i just want to arrange my hard drive more efficiently then it is right now, so any help of any kind is most welcomed.


Thanks,

Joseph

I usually do that kind of thing with one of the utilities on the ultimate boot cd

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Cheers

That black screen has nothing to do with the MBR of the hard disk.

The problem is most likely with the XP CD you are using. Try a different one.

Or, verify the integrity of the hard disk with a utility from the drive manufacturers website.

Scott

My favorite "wiper" is DBAN (Darik's boot and nuke) It is at sourceforge and also (I think) on the Ultimate Boot CD.

You really want to wipe your drive?

OK. Open a shell. su to root.

Then enter this line (assuming your drive is hda):

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024

This will write zeros to every byte of your HD.

I don't think you can wipe a drive from which you are running. (But--I have never tried it)
Much easier to use a floppy or CD

If you use jiml8's suggestion, my assumption would be that you've have to have the linux kernel running off of hdb. Or else the kernel would overwrite itself... that doesn't sound possible. Not without some nasty errors.

Why don't you show us an "fdisk -l" - probably something simple.

I wipe/shred files on my box with bcwipe.

Oh, yes you can.

Depending on how busy the system isn't, you might even manage to complete the job BEFORE jobs start crashing.

Actually, I have even had corrupted systems that I have overwritten on the fly using a backup disk image (I backup and restore using dd). Usually before doing this I drop to runlevel 1, but I have done it from runlevel 5 by just stopping all user apps and any services that might try to do something while the overwrite is underway.

The kernel is actually in memory. You can wipe the entire system without crashing it - IF you shut down any services and apps that might try to access the drive while you are doing this.

Actually, if you really want to be cool about it, you set up some ramdisks and move /tmp, /etc, /proc, and essentials from /lib and /bin into ram. Then, you can wipe and rebuild the whole system without rebooting.

Try THAT with Windows! LOL!

this has nothing to do with your mbr like ScottReed said. There is something else going on.

are you trying to install windows to a s-ata hard drive?

if you are, this could explain the problem (as far as i know, windows only supports ide hard drives)

Thanks for all your help people. I still really dont quite know what was going on, but problem i had fixed itself somehow, actually maybe it had something to with fresh installation of Fedora Core 4 and setting grub as bootloader. After setting grub as my bootloader Win XP cd and installation went smoothly, so i doubt it was win xp cd glitch.


Joseph

Windows supports sata harddrives. My cousin has a sata in his. Though the drivers for them may not be on the install disk, but I doubt that as well.