(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

long story short:

have a hard drive with windows and a really bad virus

i want to format the disk (sda1) useing the command prompt

i am running puppy from a live cd

what is this command?

dan0804smith wrote:long story short:

have a hard drive with windows and a really bad virus

i want to format the disk (sda1) useing the command prompt

i am running puppy from a live cd

what is this command?

If you are running puppy from live cd, you can click on desktop, select system, then select gparted partition manager and follow the prompts.
This gives you the option of formattnig fat32, ntfs, ext2, ext3, ext4, etc.

I am running lucid puppy 525 and lupu 268 and format drive to be ext4 partition. Seems to work better.

Also, have found this to be a very easy way to format drive and to also create multiple partitions on the drive.

This not exactly what you asked for for, but hope it helps

marjorfoo

To format to ext3 file system it's:
(Assuming sda1 is the unmounted target partition)

If it was me, considering a nasty virus being present, I would delete the partition on the drive and make a new partition first to remove the possibility of a boot virus surviving.
You could also run Dban on the drive to completely wipe it first.

AFAIK deleting/reformatting the first partition doesn't involve the Master Boot Record. This could be done also with Gparted (Device->Create Partition Table).
But this will destroy all data of the HD.

HTH
Rolf