Floppy that will automatically delete all partitions

[Pantner]

Ok, its a very common occurance for me to have to format a hdd, or delete the partitions on it...without needing to create a new partition...

is there a way to make a boot floppy that will run fdisk with some kind of switch on it, to delete all the partitions on the primary master hdd???

its annoying having to either boot into windows with it as a slave or boot from the WinXP CD and delete it that way...

or, does anyone know of a better way????

[jaclaz]

The simplest thing you can do is using a DOS (win9x one) boot disk and use the FDISK for FREEDOS.

it is easily scriptable:

http://www.23cc.com/free-fdisk/index.htm

If you simply want to delete partition entries, there are quite a bunch of programs capable of wiping out or overwriting the MBR, under DOS or Linux.

As an example, I sometimes use this ones:

http://ms-sys.sourceforge.net/

with a --mbrzero option

http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/mbrtool.htm

Or you can use MBRwizard:

http://mbrwizard.tripod.com/

with a switch of /Wipe=1 or /Wipe=2

(which is scriptable too)

jaclaz