deleting and os

[Joel Shea]

On 13/08/07, Les Gray <lgray at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> On Monday 13 August 2007 09:33:53 Les Gray wrote:
> > On Monday 13 August 2007 09:14:42 James Takac wrote:
> > > Thx Les
> > >
> > > You're the 3rd to respond so far and the basic theme seems to be a
> > > reinstall of ubuntu would be the best option. Looks like I'll go that way
> > > then
> > >
> > > James

If you do decide to go this route, and there's no separate partition
for /home, you may want to back up the /home directory before blowing
the entire ubuntu partition away.

> > If you go the reinstall route I would also 'zero-fill' the drive first
> > before putting anything else on it. This makes the drive cleaner for
> > re-use, instead of just creating a new filesystem on it.

As above, you may or may not want to back up anything important on the
disk first.

> > You can do this using the diagnostic utility of the drive's manufacturer
> > or, better yet, the versatile linux 'dd' command, which you can access from
> > a terminal within the live CD. Zero-filling is done like this -
> >
> > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd* bs=1M
> >
> > Change /dev/hd* to whatever is applicable in your case. This just writes
> > zeroes to the drive until there's no space left, at which point it stops.
> > Then you have a nice clean hard disk.
> >

Be very careful before using dd, make sure that /dev/hd? is actually
mapped to the physical disk/partition you *think* it is... (a la udev)

-- 
Joel Shea <jwshea at gmail.com>
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