Wipe HDD - FDISK fails to work

[David_Jones]

Hi All,

I am trying to wipe a HDD to completely start from scratch.

I had it dual booting Red Hat 9 and Win98 SE, but I want to scrap that, and install something else.

I am running FDISK from a Win98 Boot Diskette, and it has successfully deleted the two non-DOS partitions (Linux) leaving me with a single Primary DOS partition, and an Extended DOS Partition.

If I use option '4' it tells me that there are no logical drives in the Extended DOS partition.

However, if I try to remove that Extended Partition, FDISK reports that there *is* a logical drive that needs to be removed first.

If I try to remove a logical drive from the extended DOS partition, FDISK tells me that there isn't one there.

Any ideas?

Can I just wipe the MBR in some way perhaps to delete references to the existing partitions, and then use FDISK to re-create from scratch?

Thanks,

David.

PS: Just in case anyone is worried - I know that I will lose everything in the partitions, that is fine, it is just a play PC that I use to experiment with different OSs etc.

[mikezel]

Darik's Boot and Nuke (http://dban.sourceforge.net/) will get the job done and then some. It will completely wipe your hdd clean. Just follow the instructions on the site.
mike

[Force Flow]

You could do a zero fill using the HDD manufacturer's disk utilities, then repartition with fdisk. Linux partitions are non-dos (ext3, for example), so fdisk cannot touch them.

By doing a zero fill, the HDD is wiped clean, ready to be used again. ;)

[Confused]

When I was playing around with Linux I had to do as force_flow suggested in order to reuse the drive in Windows.

You may save the time zero fill takes by downloading and running delpart from http://www.russelltexas.com/delpart.htm

I didn't know about that program when I used zero fill and don't know if it will work but it only takes a minute to try.
Chas

[David_Jones]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the advice - you were (of course) correct that FDISK cannot remove the Linux Ext2 (or Ext3 ?) partition.

I used the Linux app form a boot disk as suggested and it is all fixed.

Thanks again,

David.

[Force Flow]

Originally posted by David_Jones
Linux Ext2 (or Ext3 ?) partition.

Depending on what you use, yes you could be using ext2 or ext3. ;)