One quick, but kludgy way to do it would be say.. cat /dev/zero to each of the partitions for a few seconds. that will murder the partition, and it will end up basically broken. at that point, youd want to mke2fs or something on each one. If you make a text list of all the partitions you want to do this to you can script it! something like..bash# for i in `cat partitions.txt`; do dd if=/dev/zero of=$i bs=1024 count=50; mke2fs $i; done
that should go through the textfile, overwrite the first ~50k of each partition with zeroes
then mke2fs it. Hope this helps! -Dan john gennard wrote:
I have a large hard drive divided into many partitions so that I can try new distros. Two large partitions hold Sarge and Unstable. Grub picks up everything and I have a quite large menu.lst file. I want to find the safest way to 'clear' the contents of partitions that I no longer need.I know I can use fdisk or cfdisk to delete each partition, immediately recreate and then format with say ext3.Is there any simple way to accomplish what I want? John. P.S. I've tried deletions in the menu.lst file, but the next time try another distro, grub picks up everything again.