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Date:      Thu, 14 Mar 2002 01:06:18 -0500
From:      Brian T.Schellenberger <bts@babbleon.org>
To:        Scott Voegtlin <davedealer2000@yahoo.com>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG, Cliff Sarginson <csfbsd@raggedclown.net>
Subject:   Re: Reformt to a FAT Paritition
Message-ID:  <20020314060618.ACDBBBA05@i8k.babbleon.org>
In-Reply-To: <20020313151226.4572.qmail@web13007.mail.yahoo.com>
References:  <20020313151226.4572.qmail@web13007.mail.yahoo.com>

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The best approach I've found for this sort of thing is to just zero out the 
partitions and/or the entire disk, depending on what you want to recover.

Then start the install for the new O/S you want to install.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0c  /* entire disk */    or
dd if=/dev/zero of=?dev/ad0cs2  /* one partition */

You could give a block count, but I usually don't, I just count to 10 and 
then ^C it.  it's really only the first block or two that you need to zero 
out.

Once you do that, the install of whatever O/S you like will see the disk 
and/or partition as unallocated and be happy to allocate it for you.

Scott-- If you've already blown away FreeBSD, and you have the disks, then 
use the disk 2 (the rescue disk) to zero it; if not, you'll have to 
re-install FreeBSD long enough to take itself off.

PS to Scott: Why would you change it over to FAT32?  The NT file system is 
vastly superior; in some respects it's actually better than the FreeBSD file 
system, as it's a journaling filesystem and thus doesn't need to "scan & 
repair" after a bad shutdown.  It's just criminal to install NT on FAT32, 
IMHO.  Not that that has anything to do with FreeBSD.


On Wednesday 13 March 2002 10:12 am, Scott Voegtlin wrote:
| Howdy
|
| I'm sorry to be a pain in the ass, but I'm absolutely desperate.. I've been
| reading through the manual and the "stuff" that came along with the OS, but
| I've stuck. I've decided that the machine I was originally going to operate
| a BsD server on is no longer adequet for my purposes.. so I was told to
| uninstall BsD on it, and format the drive back to a FAT32, and put Windows
| NT (I know, I know.. what a pain) back on it.
|
| I've installed BsD on this machine, however, I can't seem to get it off...
| How do I format the drive back to a FAT32?
|
| Thanks for your time
|
| Scott
|
|
|
| ---------------------------------
| Do You Yahoo!?
| Try FREE Yahoo! Mail - the world's greatest free email!

-- 
Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . .   bts@wnt.sas.com (work)
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . .   bts@babbleon.org (personal)
                                ME -->  http://www.babbleon.org
http://www.eff.org   <-- GOOD GUYS -->  http://www.programming-freedom.org 

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