[ale] proper way to reformat a hard drive?

[Jeff Hubbs]

> I have tried to pry some data from the hard drive with
> fdisk, but only get error messages. I have tried:
> 
> fdisk /dev/hda
>            The number of cylinders on this drive is set to
>            7297.  There is nothing wrong with that but this
>            is larger than 1024 and could, in certain setups
>            cause problems....

This was the right thing to do.  The warning about the number of
cylinders isn't an issue, although it has become fairly standard
practice to make a small (10M or more) hda1 partition for the /boot
mount point.  It's whining about making a first partition that's bigger
than 1024 virtual cylinders, which older versions of LILO couldn't boot
to.

This is one reason to steer clear of hyper-automated installs and go the
law-and-order route (Debian, Slackware, Gentoo)

- Jeff