BILL wrote: > J D wrote: > > > okay, i've tried several things to fix my major problem. nothing has > > worked. so how do i format my linux partition? last night i got bored and > > tried rm -rf / as i read to never do this unless i wanted to > > reinstall linux. but it didn't work. help! I would not suggest doing that, ever. There are better, more appropriate, ways of reinstalling linux or any OS. If you do rm -rf /, then this means to remove the root directory and I've never done this, but know that rm -rf /* will remove everything under the root directory. rm -rf / probably does the same thing, but based on other contexts, this would also remove /. In either case, this would mean not being able to shutdown or reboot the system using any command, because everything would be gone. You've got to explain your problem, because as you should obviously see, there's no description left of your problem, if you ever described it. You want help. Help others to help you. Explain what your problem is, with more detail. > > ______________________________________________________ > > Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com > > Okay, I don't truley know if this will help your MAJOR problem,but as a newbie > I have had times where I too did somthing somewheres that sent my partitions > kablooey.Tried lots of stuff that did n't work and wound up 'reinstalling" but > installing another distro ;like Caldera,and letting it clean up the partitions > when it installed,then I went back and reinstalled mandrake after the fact > when I saw that the Caldera was successful. I've done this a few times and it > has worked for me > ,but then I/m a newbie,and only came up with this on instinct,couldn't tell > you if it did anything to my machine or not .Don't think it has since I now > have a nice Mandrake 70 install thats working to ,my satisfaction > .Good luck if you decide to try this. Bill Not instinct; just desperation. This approach should not be required. You're better off asking in the expert mailing list, to learn how to properly handle your problems with Mandrake, even at the install level, before bothering with installing another distribution to try to recover. There are ways to recover or to do successful installs. mike
