trying to format and reinstall Vista Home on the gf's Inspiron, but not only will the factory-provided boot/reinstall/recovery disc refuse to reformat the HDD, a reinstallation attempt always gets hung up. I want to wipe the main NTFS partition clean, so I thought about using DBAN. I want to leave the "mediadirect" FAT32 partition intact, will DBAN give me that option or is it going to completely destroy all data on the entire disk?

Help in general is much appreciated

1/17/2011 5:44:44 PM

DBAN wipes out all writable disks connected to the computer

get an Ubuntu LiveCD and use gparted to clear out your NTFS partition

1/17/2011 10:46:34 PM

is gparted an inherent part of ubuntu or do i need to dl it separately to incorporate into the boot disk?

1/17/2011 10:52:18 PM

bump

1/19/2011 11:05:30 PM

^^gparted is part of the Ubuntu LiveCD; it's used to partition the hard disk in preparation for installing Ubuntu, but you can use it for any other purpose

1/21/2011 2:40:32 AM

awesome I'll give it a shot thank you (again)

1/21/2011 9:32:25 PM