Does formatting on install do anything?

nutthick · 03-02-2005, 03:45 AM

I've just upgraded from 10 to 10.1. When I reinstalled I repartitioned and reformatted (slow), but after installation Slack still remembered my LILO settings and my splash screen (stored in /home). The only way I could make it forget was by manually wiping the MBR. Does a format actually do anything to the drive at all? All my partitions are reiserfs, does that have something to do with it?

Anyone have any ideas what is going on?

Thanks

Carroarmato0 · 03-02-2005, 08:14 AM

What exactly did you format?

marco13185 · 03-02-2005, 08:51 AM

Maybe you only reformatted the root partition, not the home partition (assumming you have them seperate). And if lilo was stored in the MBR then slack was right to remember.

gnashley · 03-02-2005, 11:43 AM

Formatting doesn't touch the MBR.

nutthick · 03-02-2005, 11:53 AM

When you do an install and the main menu appears with 'Setup Target Partitions' or something like that. I select each partition in turn to do a 'check' format using reiserfs. I have four partitions, 1 is swap, 2 is mounted on /, 3 is mounted on /usr and 4 is mounted on /home. Obviously only 2-4 are done with this method. My LILO is mounted in the MBR, so I understand why that isn't affected by a format. But my LILO splash bitmap is stored on /home and that remained even after a format. That's what I don't understand.

In relation to LILO being placed into the MBR, wouldn't that be affected by messing around with cfdisk?