[NTLUG:Discuss] Formatting hard drive

[terry]

Philip Stetz wrote:
> I was in the middle of doing a clean install of RH 9
> and had a huge change of heart ... deciding to dump RH
> in favor of Suse.  I basically got as far as deleting
> the partitions and starting to install grub.  No big
> deal, I have backed up everything anyways.
> 
> So now I would like to wipe everything off my hard
> drive (including MBR) and start over from scratch. 
> Anyone know of any good tools I can use to create a
> boot floppy and reformat my drive with?
> 
> Thanks,
> Phil
> 
There's a good partitioning utility, fips.  (Bootable floppy) see:
http://www.igd.fhg.de/~aschaefe/fips/
You can even use fips to partition "on the fly", (in other words, non 
destructive re-partitioning)

tomsrtbt has utilities to partitioning and formatting.
See:
http://www.toms.net/rb/
I highly recommend tomsrtbt, a very powerful OS with lots of utilities 
on a single floppy.
(tomsrtbt = Tom's floppy which has a root filesystem and is also 
bootable.)
For more info see tomsrtbt FAQ: http://www.toms.net/rb/tomsrtbt.FAQ

There's also a very good bootable CD, if you have a burner to create it, 
(otherwise, you'd have to buy it from cheapbytes or someplace), but see:
http://public.www.planetmirror.com/pub/lbt/readme.html
I also highly recommend this bootable CD.  It has some very nice 
features / utilities and is relatively easy to use.