Please confirm...

[fearless]

After writing zeros to the hard drive, one must re-partition and format, right? There's a long story behind this and now a "small" argument over having to partition the drive.

Thanks,
Dr.

[DocClock aka MadClocker]

By writing zero's to the hdd, you are effectively making the drive "factory fresh"meaning that it has no partitions, and no format...so you will have to format it, and partition as well.:)

[fearless]

Thanks DocClock.

Another question, cause I know it's going to be an issue: you need an active primary partition to install an OS? I'm 90% certain that this is the case but can't find any documentation to prove it:(

Thanks,

Dr.

[JigPu]

Yes, I believe that the BIOS only looks to the active partition for boot information.

JigPu

[XWRed1]

You usually need a primary partition with the bootable flag set on it, but you could put an boot loader into the MBR of a drive that new how to load the OS out of an extended partition or something else altogether.

On my system, almost all of my partitions are primary partitions.

[fearless]

Thanks for the info guys. Now to try to explain this to someone that thinks they are computer literate:rolleyes:

Dr.

[Vovan]

They ARE COMPUTER LITERATE.
On start bios only looks for the value on track0 of HDD to set CPU´s IP. This gives a jump to the start of the boot manager or of the boot loader, depending on what is written here.
Partitions are only so-called standart for fat FATs from Microstop, but they also are accepted by Unix-based OS.