Can I wipe the disk under Windows 7? I need to wipe this disk of all information so that when I go to the installation menu, I don’t have a disk full of **** to deal with. I can’t delete the LVM volumes in the partitioning menu.
Can somebody tell me what to run on the command line of Windows 7 to get this done? I never did get Dos commands down very well.
EFI or MBR boot?
You should be able to resize Windows from the GUI to give some space no command line needed
Or if you don’t want Windows at all just tell the installer to use full disk and it will wipe out 7
One caveat; if Windows uses dynamic disk it may be a small problem
Or use an external partitioner to remove partition
Start the installer. When you get to the first screen, type Ctrl+Alt+F1
(or F2) and that should drop you to a shell as ‘root’. Now you can use
tools to quickly wipe things. For example, if it is /dev/sdb that you
want to wipe, run the following:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1048576 count=1
Thats overkill, since you really only need to wipe 512 bytes (not 1 MiB)
to clear out the partition table and the MBR, but the command above will
do the trick. Restart your system (ctrl+alt+del) and it should come up
and be detected as a disk with no partitions.
–
Good luck.
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You forgot to mention that after the text console stuff, <Alt>+<F7> will return to the graphical installation.
My preferred method of clearing a drive is:
# gdisk /dev/sdb
o
w
#
If the disk you want to delete has a GPT partition scheme then i would recommend the use of gdisk as well. With
# gdisk
x
x
z
q
even the GPT backup data gets deleted so the disk should look blank to any partition tool.
Regards
susejunky
The gdisk “o” command in the main menu removes both MBR and GPT structures. The use of “q” quits gdisk without executing any changes – “w” is needed to write changes to the drive and then exit gdisk – just like in fdisk.
Let me correct and further elaborate on this so I am clear, I have a Windows 7 installation all by itself on SDA that I have to use UEI to boot into. On another drive SDB, I would normally have the UEI where I would have to manually change the boot order and OpenSuse-Secureboot from the UEI, but I can’t use this because the SDB is an LVM volume and because it is in use, I want to use Windows 7 on the other drive to literally wipe the disk Linux SDB of anything on the disk, so I can now create a new partition structure for SDB when I install from DVD to SDB partition.
Same instruction just use sdb
You can share the efi boot partition on sda but can also add another to sdb if you want. It matters not that Linux is on sdb it is just partitions. Note Windows programs may not recognize or show LVM containers. But you can do it all from the openSUSE installer disk
I hate to ask this question, but I don’t work with Command Line much, so I feel totally alien with writing code language on CL. Can somebody write the procedure here where I can write over my SDB drive with all of its partitions back to original so that I can reload my Leap 42.1 on a clean hard drive. Windows software is where I grew up using and I understand graphical use, I never understood or used much on Command line language when I converted over to using Linux on my own personal machine. Any help would be greatly appreciated…
I have a Windows 7 installation all by itself on SDA
Just use disk management in windows.
I want to use Windows 7 on the other drive to literally wipe the disk Linux SDB
I don’t see a problem using disk manager.
Open cmd> type
diskmgmt.msc
Can somebody write the procedure here where I can write over my SDB drive
Am i wrong for even suggesting this method, if yes please explain?
Diskmgmt.msc worked just fine for me. It allowed me to delete the volumes that I could not delete on the Linux Installation Startup disk. Best solution for me. Thanks for all the input. I appreciate all the suggestions provided. I am just not comfortable with CLL in Linux or for that matter in Dos either.