[vox-tech] partitioning

[Jimbo]

Greetings:
I decided to reinstall due to major system faults that I didn't know how to 
recover from.  I have been dabbling with different distros for a solid month 
now.  Partitioning is new and dangerous territory for me but I'm not afraid 
of living dangerously.

Found a very cool and lightweight partitioning live cd 
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php that uses gnome.  Using this disk 
I first wiped out the partitions and had 12g unallocated space. Then 
partitioned 9g to ext3, 2g to swap and the rest to unused.  Once done I 
noticed that the program showed that there was still data in the first 
partition (yellow bar-key denotes data-forgot size).

Experimenting I then booted to this and found that the boot manager lilo was 
still there.  So with this I then used fdisk that I had from an old win95 
boot disk.  I deleted all the partitions and had 12g unallocated space, 
booted and saw unable to boot medium string on the screen.  Since win95 
fdisk only partitions in dos I rebooted my live gnome partition cd and made 
ext 9g partition, 2g swap partition, and the rest partitioned but not w/ any 
file system.

I then booted my hard drive and sure enough there was lilo being all 
powerful and defiant with graphics and all.  It even tried to boot, showing 
a picture of my little dog that I previously configd for non verbose loading 
in the background, but came up with a kernel error and system froze.

Is it that data doesn't get erased until written over or does the boot 
loader, and other files, reside someplace else?  Is there a good way to 
completly remove all data, boot loaders included?  Does installing a new OS 
overwrite all info if all space is used?  I was quite shocked to see my 
little dog covering my screen when I thought I deleted all info!

Worried that exisiting data could corrupt new installation.

Thank you in advance,
Jimbo