yet another Format/partition HD question (solved)

[ICanoe2]

I am a Linux newbie and I have been digging through the forum to find information on doing a "clean" install of Puppy 2.0.0. I read the formatting instructions at http://www.puppylinux.org/wikka/harddiskinstall however I find it hard to believe that it has to be this difficult. Is it really necessary to make DBN and DOS floppies?

I was "heartened" (good word Sage) to come across the following in a post on the puppy power forum.

It would be great to have a Puppy that installed easily (to revive a "dead" machine, as my old Compaq was), wiping the whole darn HD, setting up the partitions, incl.swap, and then installing everything- all in one fell swoop (whatever a "fell swoop" is).

If you read Barry's daily news updates, you will be heartened to learn that this is exactly what he plans for v 2.0

Is it true?
Basically I have been messing around on this machine over the past few months with the various puppy flavours available and now that I have learned enough to be dangerous I would like to re-format and clean up my hard drive and to run Puppy 2.0.0.

In case it is required the following is my system configuration.
Pentium P2 - 300 MHz
128 Meg of RAM
12X CD drive
1.44 floppy drive
6 Gig hard drive - currently partitioned as follows:
Device________boot____start__end__Blocks__ID____System
/dev/hda1______*_______1___385________________Linux
/dev/hda2_____________386__514________________Linux swap/Solaris
/dev/hda3_____________515__787________________Linux

I also have another "modern" machine in which I could install this drive if need be.

How can I blow away everything on the drive and re-partition it and do a complete new Puppy 2.0.0 set-up from scratch?

P.S. Thanks for Puppy, and thanks for your patience and assistance.

[sunburnt]

ICanoe2; You don't say what type of install you want to do... FULL H.D., or a simple copy of the 3 Puppy files on the CD.

I & many others here use the simple type install, just copy the files: vmlinuz, initrd.gz, & pup_003.sfs to / of the H.D.

[ICanoe2]

Sunburnt, I am running from the CD now and everything seems to work fine. Ultimately it would be nice to run completely from the hard drive however without any other media required. This machine will be dedicated to running Puppy.

[Sage]

In cases like this, I prefer to use the DOS debug script that I put up some long time back (search) even though it is overkill and can be accomplished just as easily fron a Linux console (at which I am useless). It's a simple recipe operation, so if you're good at cooking tikka masala, you'll have no difficulties!
Afterwards, when operating with marginally adequate HW, we've found, for Puppy, it's good to deploy a small swap partition as well as the main partition, which is easy-peasy with cfdisk from the console prompt. Many folks have outlined this operation here; be sure to format and edit the rc.local to start the swap space.
We are talking 'type 2' install, but terminology has changed with Puppy2.
PM me if you need additional help.

Update:
We are dealing with this by email/PM.

[ICanoe2]

I tried the HD install for Puppy 2.0 and didn't really get too far. The GRUB modification questions through me off during install.
I went back to the step by step instructions for Puppy 1.04 and used these to install Puppy 1.08r1. After downloading DBN and searching for a copy of DOS 6.22 the install went off without a hitch (cudos to the writer of the instructions!).

I didn't use your DOS dubug Sage because my Windose machine is XP.

Once again, thanks