cleaning partitions

hi all,
i installed red hat and was installing an application which uses oracle as a part of it and installs it overt the predefined partitions.Somewhere in between the installations i screwed up and want to start over .But before that i wanna clean everything on the partitions as if its just brand new OS installed.,coz else there a re a lot of conflics coming up.Could anybody tell me how i cud clean the partitions to default as to where the system was when i just installed OS with a number of partitions
thanks

Do you mean you want to format your entire hard disk? That shouldn't be hard. Just insert some sort of Linux rescue disk to boot from and run fdisk. Delete all the partitions and voilà , you're set

dude,
i dont wanna format my hard drive.
i just wanna clean my partitions ,but want to keep them as they are except that i wanna get rid of whatever was installed on them due to half install of my application and start over??
thanks

dude
cp /home /somewheresafe
cp /etc /seeabove
reinstallos

Yea dude I think you just want to remove everything and install, that's what would normally happen if you format the partitions.


Please clarify, do you want everything gone before install or not?

d00d ... you can always rm -Rf * :P j/k... well... actually you could try something similar with a rescue disk , mounting the file system and just removing everything ... but I still think it could be worth it just to format the whole thing.

I mean if you want to delete everything, you can format again... maybe consider a new format type and partition sizes

thanks all...
i actually eneded up using rm -Rf

coz i jjust wanted to clean my parititons of the half install of the application and start afresh
thanks again

That's cool,

Just for next time you should know that format using mkfs or something else to do it will only format the filesystem not change partitions. To change partitions you use fdisk or cfdisk.