Open source came the the rescue again this weekend when I needed to reformat a hard drive. I use to keep handy a Windows boot floppy to get the job done but I have not used a diskett in years. Not to metion of the three machines I currently have none of them have a floppy. Now of course I could have burned a CD or used a Windows rescue CD but none of those was available.

Enter Knoppix.

A few months back I burned a copy of Knoppix 3.6 just in case I ran into a scenario of needing a quick format. This weekend it did the trick. There are certainly other tools available to format a hard drive but QParted was the quickest access.

A spare 20GB laptop drive that was Fedora Core 2 needed to load XP Home. The reason for using Knoppix is the XP install CD was not getting anywhere with no NTSF partition. A quick boot to Knoppix and a couple clicks later, where done.