reformatting question

[Jeff Bolton]

right now i have win2k and redhat 7.1 installed on my system. i'm thinking about taking the plunge, backing up all of my mp3s, docs, apps, etc and reformatting (to get rid of some instability, and to basically clean house). i have a 4 gig windows OS partition, 2 10 gig windows data partitions, and a 4 gig linux partition. the rest of my 40 gig hdd (a little less than 10 gigs) is still raw and unpartitioned. the question i have is about the MBR. i know i can wipe out win2k with fdisk or something similar (without too much of a problem) but LILO is in the MBR. what could i use to wipe the ENTIRE hard drive clean? i mean every partition, get it back to square one- no partitions, just 40 gigs of clean space. i will most likely divide the hard drive the same way that it is again, but i have heard of problems getting rid of the MBR and still wanting to boot into linux even though that partition isn't there.

either way, i would install 2k first and then install linux, since it works better that way and i can use LILO to manage my book choices.

thanks in advance for any answers. :p

jeff

[Jon]

Win2K's partitioning software is powerful enough to remove the MBR if created by Linux.

Just go about your normal install and any Linux partitions will show up as "Damaged, unformatted or unknown file system" to Win2K. It will still allow you to delete them.

[Jeff Bolton]

thanks dogg. now i know :p

now to set about the grueling task of backing up multiple gigabytes of data that i don't want to lose. i might get around to reformatting by the end of the semester :p

jeff