[Techtalk] "Redeploying" a Linux Box.......

[Maureen Seller]

Hello all!

I'm a SysAdmin in a smallish office.  My office is growing (yay), but not 
my budget (boo).  I need to "shuffle machines" rather than purchase new 
machines whenever possible.  I've got a webserver running RedHat whose 
services I migrated to one of my other RedHat boxes, and my IDEA was that I 
would "redeploy" the redundant box as a Windoze machine for a new user.

No good idea goes unpunished.  I can't seem to get the disk back to a state 
where my windows setup disks will install on to it.  I tried just blasting 
the boot block (using dd to write a block from /dev/random to the master 
boot block), and that didn't work:  Windows setup said "there was an error 
creating the boot block on this disk" and plain old fdisk didn't recognize 
any partitions.  (We're talking Windows 98 2nd ed., btw.)

So I went back to the RedHat disk and reinstalled, this time allocating a 
huge chunk of the disk as a DOS partition.  Now when I run fdisk it sees 
the partitions I created, but I can't format the disk and Windows Setup 
still gives me errors when I try to wipe/reformat/repartition the disk.

Long setup, short question:  Can anyone tell me how to effectively "wipe" 
this disk of its partitioning/formatting information so I can start fresh 
with a clean install of Winblows?

<sigh>

Sorry for the backhanded Linux question.  Thanks for any help!

- mo'




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    maureen seller
    mseller at greatplacetowork.com
    www.greatplacetowork.com
    286 divisadero
    san francisco, ca  94117
    (415) 503-1234 x318
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