Red Hat Wipe Out

[pappaw55]

I'm giving my old computer to my niece for her kids to play games. How do I wipe out the partiton and its contents and clean out my old files? I installed a double boot for Linux Red Hat on it.

I want to clear out the Linux OS, because it doesn't see my old printer.

[Ben]

So do you want to wipe the whole hard drive? Or do you have two OSes and want to keep one and wipe the other?

In the first case, boot with any linux live CD and run
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda (assuming /dev/sda represents your harddrive, you could check this out with fdisk -lu, e.g.)

This will overwrite each block with a 0, once (which is enough, no matter o dusicussion overwriting n times to be safe).

In the second case it's more or less the same, just change the of=/dev/sda to the partition linux is stored, e.g. /dev/sda2.
But you also need to take care of the bootloader...

[pappaw55]

I hhave Window 98 and Red Hat. Want to take off the Red Hat and the partition.

[jabbertooth]

Ya I believe changing the of=/dev/sda should take care of the partition you want to whip out, then just address the bootup and you should be ok