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Formating a hard drive
As a personal project of mine I'm trying to format my hard drive on my laptop. I would like to do this, without using windows anything or buying some kind of software to do this. So I've been searching the Internet trying to figure how to do this. Almost all of the sites I've found all want me to either have a windows boot floppy disk, CD (OS installer), or restore disk that came with the PC.
I'm thinking Linux might have a way to do this for me but I'm not entirely sure. I found a distro called SLAX that seems it might do the job. There are several types of SLAX to use and I tried the console version called Slax Frodo. Slax Frodo has booted up on my laptop without any problems and there are some menu options I can choose from.
One of these options is cfdisk. I selected that option and it looks like I can delete my partition using this command. Now for my newb question. If i delete my partition and then create a new one. Would this be effectively the same thing as if I were to format my old partition?
I'm thinking Linux might have a way to do this for me but I'm not entirely sure. I found a distro called SLAX that seems it might do the job. There are several types of SLAX to use and I tried the console version called Slax Frodo. Slax Frodo has booted up on my laptop without any problems and there are some menu options I can choose from.
One of these options is cfdisk. I selected that option and it looks like I can delete my partition using this command. Now for my newb question. If i delete my partition and then create a new one. Would this be effectively the same thing as if I were to format my old partition?
Comments
One thing to be careful of with laptops is that they often have a spare partition, usually 600MB - 2GB or so, that contains a restore partition, and if you ever want to get the laptop how it was when you got it, you don't want to remove that. If your aim is to re-install the windows to be how it was when you got it, you should look up in the manual how to do that, eg. I just happened to look this up today; My Toshiba I have to hold '0' when it's booting.
/me read the first message again and realized that I wasted time writing all of that out. My bad.