I'm very much a noob to linux, installing DSL because I had nothing better to do. However, I now have a need to get it off of my machine, yet I can't figure out how.
Basically, what I'm asking is, how can I format my hard drive to the point of which I can install a new OS? I've heard about the "cfdisk" command, but it doesn't show any hard drives when I enter it.
Thank you!.
You need to boot from a Live CD and use some kind of partition editor program to delete your DSL partitions on the hard drive. I recommend the GParted program for this purpose.
The DSL live CD itself might do (not sure if it ships with GParted), or you can get a dedicated GParted Live CD from
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
Once booted from the live CD (don't do this from the hard drive you're erasing, for obvious reasons), launch GParted and then just right-click each partition and choose Delete.*
Once you click Apply to write the changes to the hard drive, you'll have a blank, unformatted, unpartitioned drive that another OS installer will be able to do what it wants with.
* Completely obvious, but I should say this anyway - you will lose all the data on the partitions you delete. Presumably you don't care about the data on them, but if you do, back it up first. ;)