I can find plenty of guides on the Internet on how to format a drive using windows and/or MS-DOS but I have a laptop that has nothing but opensuse on it and I want to format the drive…
How would I go about doing that exactly? Really, can’t figure it out O_o
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Because the microsoft world doesn’t give you options in filesystems the
‘format’ command is the only option there, or you can do it via Disk
management (or something like that… right-click My Computer:
Manage). How you do the same in Linux depends on your filesystem, and
your desires. Since “formatting” isn’t something you do just for fun
what is your goal? Is this a soon-to-be Linux box or an already running
system that just acquired a new hard drive? Did you just wipe away
something and are now wanting to put in another partition and filesystem
for data or are you trying to clean off your entire hard drive from all
data? Yast has a Partitioner that can probably help you in many cases
but otherwise mkfs is probably the command you want; of course you need
to partition before you can create a filesystem and ‘fdisk’ is used for
that.
Good luck.
yolsl wrote:
> I can find plenty of guides on the Internet on how to format a drive
> using windows and/or MS-DOS but I have a laptop that has nothing but
> opensuse on it and I want to format the drive…
>
> How would I go about doing that exactly? Really, can’t figure it out
> O_o
>
>
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“an already running system that just acquired a new hard drive?”
Well, it’s an already running system that has a normal hard drive, but the hard drive doesn’t have the operating system I prefer on it because I’m very unfamiliar with openSUSE and as far as I can tell there’s no reason to get used to it since I already work well with Ubuntu.
I was just going to install Ubuntu on it and I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal, I had a Ubuntu live cd to use already but according to people on the Ubuntu forums, it’s not that easy - I have to format the hard drive to install it properly, OR already have windows and use the wubi.exe that’s in the iso available for download. Since I don’t have a windows disk I went to format it only to realize that the same commands for MS-DOS don’t apply to openSUSE.
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I can’t imagine that a LiveCD or LiveDVD would be able to do an
installation of any OS and not know how to do the partitioning and
filesystem management therein. If your box already has SUSE but you’re
going to go to Ubuntu then Ubuntu should be able to do the
partitioning… I installed Ubuntu from installation media a year or
two ago and it had options for doing partitioning in there very similar
to how SUSE does during its own isntallation (it’s all Linux after all).
Have you tried and had it fail somehow already?
Even if you do “format” the drive Ubuntu will still need to use that
same drive. If I were you I’d at least give the install of Ubuntu a
shot and watch for when it talks about partitioning your drive.
Good luck.
yolsl wrote:
> “an already running system that just acquired a new hard drive?”
>
> Well, it’s an already running system that has a normal hard drive, but
> the hard drive doesn’t have the operating system I prefer on it because
> I’m very unfamiliar with openSUSE and as far as I can tell there’s no
> reason to get used to it since I already work well with Ubuntu.
>
> I was just going to install Ubuntu on it and I figured it wouldn’t be a
> big deal, I had a Ubuntu live cd to use already but according to people
> on the Ubuntu forums, it’s not that easy - I have to format the hard
> drive to install it properly, OR already have windows and use the
> wubi.exe that’s in the iso available for download. Since I don’t have a
> windows disk I went to format it only to realize that the same commands
> for MS-DOS don’t apply to openSUSE.
>
>
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I think clearing the partition table will do fine. Become root and overwrite it with zero’s. Which will prevent openSUSE from booting again.
Now after booting from CD/DVD the Ubuntu installer sees a blank disk, without any partitions.
I haven’t tried the last release of Ubuntu though so can’t rule out any weird bugs in their isntaller which would break this.
I know for a fact that the partion program that comes with ubuntu will let you wipe out the hard drive and install ubuntu with all the nessary things but if you just want a partion program then you may want to look at Gparted. Its part of the Gnome project. It allows you to create a bootable cd that you can run the partion program from
I know for a fact that the partion program that comes with ubuntu will let you wipe out the hard drive and install ubuntu with all the necessary things but if you just want a partion program then you may want to look at Gparted. Its part of the Gnome project. It allows you to create a bootable cd that you can run the partion program from