[SOLVED] Wiping my second hard drive

[NotVgood]

First post from someone who's not all that confident...
I recently installed Mint 9 on a new hard drive - works fine after a bit of messing around with the sound.
My PC also contains a second hard drive; the older one on which Mint 8 (now not used) was installed.
My plan is to use first hard drive day-to-day and backup to the second. However, I want to clean everything off it first. I wouldn't mind if someone could spare the time to show me how I should go about this and prevent me from accidentally destroying everything (a great party trick of mine). Also, when I start the PC, grub (is that right?) presents me with a variety of options, including booting Mint 8 on the second drive. I'd like to get rid of this as well if possible.

Thanks in advance

Ian

[Aging Technogeek]

First, install Gparted from Software Manager in Mint 9.

Unmount your Mint 8 partition.

Start Gparted and use it to create a new partition table on your Mint 8 drive from Mint 9. (Don't worry about destroying Mint 9, Gparted will not work on a mounted partition, especially one it is mounted inside of.) Format the drive to ext2 or ext3 for use as storage.

Once Gparted has finished, open a terminal and enter

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sudo update-grub

This will remove the Mint 8 entries from the grub boot menu. Make certain you run update grub before you shut off the computer or you may have trouble getting back into Mint 9.

When you reboot, if Mint 9 is the only OS on the computer, the grub menu may be hidden. If yoou want to have the menu displayed on boot, open a terminal and enter

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 gksu gedit /etc/default/grub

Enter your password and, in the gedit window, find this line in the grub default folder

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GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true

and change the last word to false.

Run "sudo update-grub" again to pick up the change you just made.

[NotVgood]

Worked fine. Second drive is now formatted as ext3.

Had a moment's concern about the "GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true" bit; changing between true and false seemed to have no effect.
However, then I noticed the line above it (GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0) started with a "#".
I guessed that this was why no change occurred, removed the "#" and then changing between "true" and "false" actually achieved what you intended it to.

Thank you for your assistance (and an injection of confidence!).

Ian