[NBLUG/talk] Dell Latitude - Erase HDD

Lincoln Peters sampln at sbcglobal.net
Wed Mar 9 13:27:49 PST 2005


On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 12:53 -0800, Mark Street wrote:
> A client has a Dell Latitude Win2000 box that was locked by its previous owner 
> and would like to install his own OS on it.  Problem is no CD or peripherals.
> 
> we have several options.
> 1. USB floppy
> 2. USB Thumb drive
> 3. USB CD-ROM
> 
> Should I just smoke it with fdisk from a Tom's RBT floppy?
> Saving the data is not an issue.  What would be the quickest and painless.

Tom's RTBT is probably the simplest option, since you said that you
don't need to save the data, and it's faster to download and write a
boot floppy than a Knoppix CD (although if you already have a Knoppix
CD, it should work just as well, and you wouldn't need to make a new
boot floppy).

However, I don't know how well Tom's RTBT supports USB mass storage
devices (I didn't get my first USB mass storage device until a few years
after I last used Tom's RTBT), so you may be forced to use Knoppix
instead (which should support USB devices just fine, although I've never
tried to boot Knoppix from one).


Either way, fdisk should work fine.  And if it doesn't, there's always
"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda" followed by fdisk...

---
Lincoln Peters
<sampln at sbcglobal.net>

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.  There might be a
law against it by that time.




More information about the talk mailing list