Removing Knoppix

[Kutison]

Hey, I am having a little trouble wiping my drive with knoppix in it

The system is not reconizing the floppy drive or CD drive or USB

I can make a DBAN floppy to wipe the drive on a windows OS but when placed in my computer with Knoppix it does not run DBAN when booting, does not work for CD's or a Flash Drive.

any sugestions?

I also don't have the root password because I bought the computer from someone else.

[Manchunian]

Apparently you have Knoppix installed on a hard drive. This should never be done. Knoppix is not supposed to be installed like that, it is a Live cd and putting it on a hard drive can cause grief.
When you say that the system doesn't recognise the CD drive, is it enabled in the BIOS? Can you boot from a CD?
The root password problem will be easy to sort out. When you remove Knoppix (which you really should do) and replace it with something else, you'll be able to create a new root password.

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

Do you want to wipe Hard Disk, no data, no partitions? Is Knoppix booting up fine?

[oz]

Check this HowTo for resetting the root password, then go to a terminal or konsole, su to root, and enter the following command to totally wipe the drive of all content:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

You'll need to replace /dev/sda with your actual device name such as /dev/hda.

If needed, you can use the fdisk -l command to determine your device name:

fdisk -l

Note that it's a lowercase letter "L" in the fdisk command, and not a numeral 1.

[Kutison]

Yes, Knoppix is installed on the hard drive, not something that I would have done, but that's just how it came.

One of the reasons from me removing knoppix was that I did not have the root password, but I'll see if I can reset it, thanks.

And the CD drive is being kind of strange. It' will read CD's, but not auto play them when loaded.
I can install games, but when I go to try to play them, it says that it cannot read a required file and for me to insert the CD.


Also as a side note, when originally trying to wipe the drive with DBAN, I could not make the disk on this computer because the drives could not be detected.

[devils casper]

Boot up Knoppix and execute 'dd' command in Konsole as suggested by ozar. It will wipe your harddisk.
In case it doesn't work, execute fdisk -l command and post output here.

su -
fdisk -l

* Its small L in fdisk -l.

[Kutison]

Ok, so I screwed up resetting the root password somehow

I believe I edited the kernels wrong because now when the OS begins to load it says

GRUB 1.5 loading...
Error 17

So no I can't load knoppix to do these things....

Maybe I should just suck it up and by a new hard drive for that old piece of crap comp...

[devils casper]

Do you have Floppy Drive?

[enyocnosaj]

Apparently you have Knoppix installed on a hard drive. This should never be done. Knoppix is not supposed to be installed like that, it is a Live cd and putting it on a hard drive can cause grief.

What kind of grief are we talking about? I have Knoppix installed on my IBM thinkpad right now, concurrently with Windows XP. XP loads by default on a 60 gig partition, or I have 25 seconds to choose Knoppix 5.1 on a 10 gig partition. Since it all runs smoothly now am I in the clear? Or is something expected to break later? o_O;;;

[devils casper]

What kind of grief are we talking about?

This is from Knoppix Wiki :

Be cautioned, however, that because Knoppix is designed for use from a Live CD, some choices have been made that are good when running from a live CD, but do cause problems when attempting to install Knoppix to hard disk, particularly when updating and installing new software. There are many and frequent reports of things that worked fine from the CD but stopped working after a "hard disk install".

More details are here.