UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,
I had created a primary partition (/dev/sda3) and made ext3 file system on it.
then mounted it on a directory and touch a file (x) into this partition.

however, I want to remove this partition and recreate it as an empty partition. so I used 'd' in fdisk command and delete that partition. But, when I create a new partition, after mounting, there was that file (x) into the new partition. although I don't recreate the file system.

rebooting the OS and removing /dev/sda3 and create this partition as /dev/sda4 does not solve this problem. How can I create a raw partition again? how can I remove the file system over the partition? is there any command like 'rmsf' (as exists in HP-UX) ?

OS: RHEL5.5
Platform: vmware

Hello.

Removing (or creating) a partition with fdisk only updates the partition table. It doesn't affect any other data on the disk (i.e. filesystems).

If you want an "empty" partition again, you can run mkfs again or, alternatively, to "remove" the filesystem:

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda3 count=3 bs=512

thank you scott.

You're very welcome.

Please note that I've moved your thread to a more "generic" forum, as your question is not strictly related to Red Hat.