[luau] Bizarre request

[Hawaii Linux Institute]

Karen Lofstrom wrote:

>Of course it would be nice to just hand them a Linux box, but I don't
>think they could handle it (the parents have eighth-grade educations).
>Plus they want to go online with AOL, play popular games, etc. So I've got
>to figure out a way to remove the SUSE OS and reformat the HD to Windoze.
>I'm stuck. Windoze fdisk won't remove Linux partitions, and an attempt at
>Linux fdisk from the command line, as root, failed. I can't get the system
>to remove itself!
>
>I faced a problem like this a few years ago, but I was able to back out
>with a Red Hat installation diskette.  I don't have it now; I gave my
>whole Red Hat set to a poor Chinese student. So what CAN I do to wipe the
>system clean? I have a SUSE boot disk but it just reverts to the regular
>HD boot.
>

1.  The easiest way is to make a boot floppy using the following command 
(must be in root):

/sbin/mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0 `uname -r`

Reboot from the newly created boot floopy then do a /sbin/fdisk to 
delete all the partitions. 

2.  Many AOL users believe they can't get away from Windows because of 
their e-mail accounts.  While Mozilla still cannot do AOL mails, you can 
set up AOL accounts with Netscape.

3.  I have a spare Athlon system, still very powerful (GHz level).  Plse 
let me know if you can use it.  wayne