Clean installing Mandriva, and getting rid of a pesky partition


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OK, long story short... I had XP, I installed Mandriva. There was a partition, then I deleted it. That ****ed up some stuff... I ran Mandriva live and attempted to "Live install" but after a moment I keep getting "a new medium has been detected what do you want to do?" and then you have the choice of either "do nothing" or "open in a new window" Considering "do nothing" got me an unwanted partition last time (the drive that it finds is the same size as the partition). I hit "open in new window" but it won't let me delete, or unmount the drive. How do I do a clean install (i selected the option to do a clean install last time and got the partition, the "new medium detected" part comes after the option to either partition or clean install.

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Does not the live cd have a partitioning program? If so, run that before you try to install.

atlef.

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If you need to clean out your partition table, run this command in a terminal as root.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

It will do a "data dump" using an input file of "zero", outputting to your hard drive boot sector, 512 bytes, just once.

That will remove all traces of previous partitions from the table. It should be cleaner and easier to install your OS(es) at that point, since the installers seem to be a bit confused by your existing partitions.

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