Topic: Reinstall

[Looney Tunes]

I want to mirror my IDE drive on my e-Smith/Mitel server. I have two identical drives. The boot disk tells me I have to do a completely new install, so I'd like to verify that the following will work:

1. Create a reinstall disk from server manager
2. Backup to desktop
3. Completely remove all partitions from both drives
4. Reinstall, using the reinstall disk
5. Restore from desktop

If anyone could provide any missing steps BEFORE I start down this slippery slope, I'd be eternally grateful.

[Looney Tunes]

Oh yeah! How do you remove the partitions? I haven't been able to find a fdisk utility that makes sense here.

[Jimbo]

You could look for a bootable dist that has cfdisk (easy to use) I think knoppix does.

HTH
Jimbo

[Ray Mitchell]

get delpart.exe from a shareware site and copy it to a bootable Win98 disk or similar
or
read the e-smith FAQ at
http://www.e-smith.org/faq.php3#7q15

Under the heading
Why is only half of my available disk space being reported on my software RAID system?
..........To remove any partition tables, perform the following commands as root:

   dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
   dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc bs=512 count=1

Regs
Ray