Resetting Linux

[SirFido]

Hia,

I bought and fixed a server a few weeks ago, installed some new hardware and the newest version of Linux Mint. I've been messing around with different software solutions for what I wanna do and I finally have everything planned. The problem is, now I've got a very messy server with lots of different crap on it and I wanna wipe it completely. There is one SSD (with OS) and two HDD's (formatted with ZFS) in the machine and I wanna wipe everything, the ZFS formatting, all files and start all new. How would I best go about doing that?

Cheers

[Guest]

If your Planning to run a Server I would look at CentOS, Fedora Server, Ubuntu Server in that order. None of them have a Desktop Environment however, so if you want one you would need to install it. I wouldn't use Mint. If your looking to do email and web hosting or anything of that nature, I would recommend checking out centos-webpanel.

 

If you want to start over, download a ISO and burn it with etcher. Then do a clean install like how you normally install linux.

The only Distro I know of that can drop down to a bare base packageset and be resetup on the fly is Arch.

[Radium_Angel]

13 minutes ago, SirFido said:

Cheers

DBAN is your friend

[Eigenvektor]

14 minutes ago, SirFido said:

There is one SSD (with OS) and two HDD's (formatted with ZFS) in the machine and I wanna wipe everything, the ZFS formatting, all files and start all new. How would I best go about doing that?

Pretty much any installer (Windows or Linux) will let you delete partitions and create new ones. Alternatively you could boot a Linux live-USB and use a tool like GParted to remove all of the partitions before installing a new OS.

[HotCheeseNachozAndBurritoz]

Servers are better served without a GUI. I use Fedora Server at my home but any minimal Linux distro designed for servers will do. Windows is a terrible choice for a server unless you are running Windows Server which is still burning garbage. If you are planning to set up a file storage server, use FreeNAS (BSD instead of Linux) otherwise set up a RAID-1 with those 2 HHDs and slap a Linux distro meant for server into it. 

[sp331yi]

lsblk

to see how HDDs and SSD are recognized and named

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=4096 conv=notrunc,sync status=progress

Where X designates the HDD or SSD being overwritten with zeroes

 

It's slow, but quicker than DBAN