[Linux-disciples] Low-level reformatting under Linux

[Stephen R Laniel]

On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 02:14:59PM -0400, Adam Kessel wrote:
> Do you mean reformat or repartition?  Why can't you just cfdisk and
> mkfs.ext3?  Are you concerned about traces of old data?

Ah. See, I don't know about cfdisk and mkfs.ext3. What I
mean is that, say, there's a 100G disk, all of which is
currently a big NTFS partition. They now want it to be
dual-boot, so I'll take, say, 50G of that for Linux and
format it as ext3. There may already be data on that portion
of the disk, so I'd need some smart program to move the data
off to another part of the disk, then repartition the disk
and format that 50G as ext3. I believe there exist unfree
programs like Partition Magic to take care of this, but I'd
like to do it for free (and with free software).

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