
Originally Posted by
The Fish
Update.
Cleaned MBR, with Paragon,not DBAN as this didn't run in the laptop. Did in my machine. So I began to suspect iffy DVD drive on the laptop as well. But when I tried to install Win 7 demo, it said the NTFS filing was an unsupported version. Formatted in Win 7 and its currently installing.
I hope it will. Learnt Paragon has a useful rescue disk, with a MBR utility and disk ones. But may not format in a Win supported way. Got DBAN, liked the look of that. Found handy 90 trial of Win 7, but make sure you say you are an IT person or they sweep you off to another page.
And finally, educate your mates to mirror images before they mess up. Lets hope I'm not back tomorrow
lol.
It's often best (easier) to let Windows initialise and format the disk once you've wiped it, especially Windows Vista/7 as they need to create a small boot partition at the start of the disk - when you create the first partition you'll see two appear in that space.
Oh and for future reference, to wipe the MBR under from a LiveCD:
Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M count=1
Replace '/dev/sda' with the disk you want to wipe, check what's installed with:
Note that sda1 sda2 etc are partitions on the disk, miss out the number at the end or you'll just write to a partition.
If you use a LiveCD that doesn't have you as root by default (Ubuntu, for example) then before doing the above type: