[ale] proper way to reformat a hard drive?

[kilpatms at mindspring.com (Sean Kilpatrick)]

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A brief tale of woe:
I am putting together a box for "development/education."
Stuffed a 60 gb hard drive in it that had in a previous
  life been used as a slave drive -- no OS & no boot
  sector.
Tried to install SuSE.
The OS installed (with some unresolved headaches) but it
  will not boot on its own. If I don't have the install
  CD in the drive, the BIOS apparently can not find the
  boot sectors on the HD and simply stops.
Obviously I need to try again, but how do I get the Suse
  install routine to properly create the boot sectors?
  Now I have one 56 gb partition and no idea what happened
  to the missing 4 gb of space.

Assistance (before the installfest) would be appreciated.

Sean

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