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Basically I had another distro on my hard drive but I want to format it for complete use by Arch. I know how to set it up and such, it's just the formatting/partitioning part that I'm a little bit confused about (read the 3rd paragraph to know why).

I did this previously by simply using cfdisk and deleting all of the partitions on the drive and creating new ones, but does this actually remove all of the previous data that was stored on the drive?

The reason I'm unsure about this is because when I went to mkfs.ext4 on the root partition it said it was swap and prompted me do I want to use it anyway, does this mean it will overwrite the previous one (which previously that partition was swap before I deleted it and wrote new ones).

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cfdisk only writes the MBR of your disk, it doesn't wipe the rest of the disk.

If you layout your new partitions to start at the same location as the start of partitions previously your installer might detect that. From what you describe you either previously had some swap space where you wanted a ext4 partition to reside, or maybe you had the partition type set to swap (82) instead of "normal" Linux (83).

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  • I know that the type was definitely not swap the second time round but it was the first time, so that makes me feel like I'm required to format it before I write any new partitions. What would be the best way to format the whole drive "/dev/sdb", and a good format type? Apr 2, 2015 at 11:01
  • @Exhibitioner it's absolutely unnecessary to low-level format the hard drive. Just create the partitions you want and then the filesystems.
    – teppic
    Apr 2, 2015 at 14:41
  • @Exhibitioner I agree with teppic. That the installers tries to find some possible existing partition is primarily to easily recover in case you realised you did want to preserve some existing data. The only time I had problems that required action is when (re-)inserting drives that were part of an mdadm raid and had to zero the header of a partition explicitly.
    – Anthon
    Apr 2, 2015 at 14:46

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