Bringing this thread to a close as I'm the OP: 1) Thanks to the people who actually provided help.
2) To the others, isn't one of the purposes of Linux to allow us to do what we want, how we want, when we want? I have a preference to blank hdd sectors with zeros before doing a new OS installation; I've done it for years with DBAN, etc., on various operating systems. If you think it's pointless, senseless or whatever else, fine, but FWIW, on the 20 GB partition, it took all of 5 minutes using the dd command from an Ubuntu Live CD. FIVE MINUTES. And I know the hdd is good as new and ready to accept fresh data. 3) For anyone else who wants to do it, I wound up doing two things: blanking the MBR with "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1" and the hdd partition with "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda2 bs=1M". Now, go ahead and judge me for blanking the MBR even though the installation went perfectly and the MBR blank took less than 1 second. :) Bye, Mark
