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View Full Version : [SOLVED] Format disk while it's in use



undrline
November 28th, 2011, 08:51 PM
I installed Maverick but I need to downgrade to Lucid. For some reason, it won't finish booting to the 10.04 live cd and hangs on the Ubuntu throbber. So, I want to just blank the hard drive and try booting to the cd again. How do I reformat/blank the partition of a disk while it's in use? Gparted, understandably, wants me to unmount it first.

satanselbow
November 28th, 2011, 08:52 PM
Boot into a live cd and use gparted from there.

cholericfun
November 28th, 2011, 08:55 PM
well, as you say yourself, you cant format a drive that is mounted (Full stop).

Also i don't quiet see your problem. Your LiveCD isn't loading -easiest to try a different (...liveUSB) one?
I don't see how a freshly formated HD will change the behaviour of your liveCD in any way.

undrline
November 28th, 2011, 09:21 PM
Thanks cholericfun. I thought it might be possible because I recalled someone jokingly putting a detrimental command out there. This forum came with warnings about running terminal commands you don't understand. But, maybe it was a command to erase your home directory, not format your drive.

I know this live cd works when I use it with a blank drive, but for some reason no Lucid cd has ever worked on my machines if the disk had a bootable os on it no matter how much I messed with the BIOS settings or F-keys.

I'll try the Maverick cd, which is what I think satanselbow was getting at. Also, I do have a disk-to-usb converter, so if that doesn't work, I can just boot to the old HDD and format it as an external drive.

cholericfun
November 30th, 2011, 06:01 PM
i can't think of any reason why your live cd doesnt boot while having a hd on. thats not no say there couldnt be one...

do i understand correctly that you can boot to the cd and select the live modus and then it gets stuck?

undrline
November 30th, 2011, 09:30 PM
i can't think of any reason why your live cd doesnt boot while having a hd on. thats not no say there couldnt be one...

do i understand correctly that you can boot to the cd and select the live modus and then it gets stuck?

Nope, if there's a bootable drive, it doesn't even get to the try/install selection. I can get to the F6 list sometimes, but choosing install does nothing except put me back to the loading throbber.

I used the Maverick live cd, and gparted was there but crashed on start. I suppose I could've done it through the terminal, but I'm too much of a nervous nellie. Instead, I put my old hard drive back in, and I used my swiss-army-knife of storage adapters (http://goo.gl/MM17V NexStar Universal Storage Adapter), to mount and re-partition the new disk. Switched back to the now-blank new disk, with the Lucid cd and all was well.

Thanks everyone for your help, and confirmation that a disk can not be formatted while in use.

cholericfun
December 1st, 2011, 02:09 PM
very belated afterthought:
you could change the BIOS to only boot from CD and not the harddrive. This still enables you to access the HD from within the livecd.

undrline
December 1st, 2011, 10:37 PM
very belated afterthought:
you could change the BIOS to only boot from CD and not the harddrive. This still enables you to access the HD from within the livecd.

lol, I lready tried that; when I said "no matter how much I messed with the BIOS settings" I meant it :) I still have to do F9:Boot Options and select CD most of the time even for versions later than Lucid or for Windows. I tried different optical drives, too. Half the time, I can get it to boot to lubuntu minimal on a usb stick. The only thing any of my machines seem to boot to reliably without intervention is a floppy disk. Really, it's only thing you can use a floppy drive for anyhow. Is there a "boot to floppy, then install everything else on the hdd with a sudo apt-get ubuntu-desktop --askmewhichversion" image out there for ubuntu? That'd be nice to have in the computer cabinet for emergencies :P