Re: uninstall Debian
Andrew McMillan <andrew@catalyst.net.nz> writes:
> On Tue, 2002-04-16 at 08:57, Nick wrote:
> > I need to uninstall Debian so I can reinstall from scratch, how can I
> > uninstall everything.
>
> I've _always_ wanted to say to someone to just:
>
> su
> rm -rf /
Personally, I prefer one of
# shred /dev/hda # you'll wipe Win-DoS too if installed
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda
to really scrub the hard disk clean, but they can take quite a bit of
time with large disks. They really get rid of your data (especially
when using shred, see `man shred`) which is usually a good idea when
you plan to junk/sell/give away your machine.
If you want to keep Win-DoS, just loop over the /dev/hda* devices that
you want to clear and skip the ones you want to keep.
> And finally it is halfway reasonable advice! :-)
>
> Seriously, do an 'fdisk -l /dev/hda' and a 'df' to see what your
> partitions are at the moment and where they are mounted. Save that
> information.
>
> Use 'cfdisk /dev/hda' and delete the partitions that have Debian on
> them.
You can do that during the reinstall. Just switch to the second
virtual terminal with ALT+F2 and you have a shell where you can do
these basic things directly or go down the installer's menu to (re)
partition the hard disk.
> Reboot from your Debian installation media (CD, preferably) and you
> will be able to do a completely clean install of Debian.
>
> On the other hand this is kind of a strange request. Very few
> situations require a complete reinstall, and you should even be able
> to do a reinstall over the top of the existing install, but it could
> potentially be messy - the approach above will end up with a
> completely clean system, but means losing your data files (under
> Debian - your windows ones should be OK).
Sometimes it's easier to just reinstall the whole bunch (although you
may want to keep /home -> put it on a separate partition to do that!).
It's probably also a good idea to backup /etc before going ahead. It
may come in handy later when (re)configuring stuff.
--
Olaf Meeuwissen Epson Kowa Corporation, CID
GnuPG key: 6BE37D90/AB6B 0D1F 99E7 1BF5 EB97 976A 16C7 F27D 6BE3 7D90
LPIC-2 -- I hack, therefore I am -- BOFH
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-laptop-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: