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I have a Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop with a spare HDD. I'm trying to install Knoppix 4.0 on the spare drive (it can be safely wiped as everything of importance is on the other drive; this one is old). QTParted will not allow me to format or even partition the drive; the error message I get is "does not support opening ntfs" or similar. Any ideas? I have been told that Dell does something strange with their restore partition that may be affecting any partitioning attempts.
You must be root in order to write to the MBR.
Delete all of the partitions and start fresh. Unless you wish to keep that utility partition. There should be no issues using a partition editor, but, you can always zero out the MBR with the command: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/your_hard_drive bs=512 count=1 . This will write 512 zeroes to the first sector of your designated device.
If you wish to keep a copy of the MBR, use the command: dd if=/dev/your_hard_drive of=/file/name bs=512 count=1 .