recover from a bad F16 install

[R. G. Newbury]

 > Aaron wroteL
> For what you are doing all you need is a LiveCD and fdisk applied to a
> unmounted disk. There is a option inn fdisk to clear all partitions from
> the disk which will leave you in a position to partition the disk from
> scratch. parted and/or partitionmagic are not needed. I assume that your
> disk will be something like /dev/sda so you would run the command :
> fdisk /dev/sda,
> and away you go.

 From my experience, fdisk alone will not do the job as it is not gpt 
aware. I recently purchased a new SSD and started a really bare-metal 
install of F16. And I was unable to partition the disk as I desired, 
since ananconda had decided that it would be gpt.

It took quite a while for me to recover from that, as I had no idea 
about gpt, and my first tries involved non-gpt aware methods. gpt writes 
to different places on the disk and ALL of those spots must be cleared. 
I ended up using dd to overwrite the first and last couple of megs of 
the disk, to get the gpt traces expunged.
Until I did that, I got errors.
Geoff
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