I am trying to reinstall ubuntu 13.04 because i for lack of better terms "effed up"
I have a CD/DVD with ubuntu 13.4 on it and i know it works because that's how i installed this OS on this new/fresh/hardware rig to begin with
when i have the CD/DVD in and click reboot it just boots to my last installed version, How do i get it to access the CD/DVD to walk me thruough the installization again?
just change your boot sequence in your BIOS so that your DVD drive comes first, usually you can access your BIOS setup by pressing DEL or F2 at startup
an alternative is to display the boot menu which enable you to choose a device to start from, usually by pressing ESC or TAB or a F keys (F9 or so) at startup before the OS loads
please refer to your PC documentation
For starters you are telling your bios some how to boot off of the cd right? This is very computer specific and I assume you know how to do it because you probably had to do that for the install in the first place. Check the boot order in your bios, or look for the button to press during the initial stage of boot up to select a one time medium to boot off of and that should fix your problem.
To really wipe your hard drive you would have to still boot off of the cd, and use it as a live-cd (ie boot ubuntu from the cd, so it isn't caring about your hard drive at all) then do something like
DRIVE=a #note there is no space between these when assigned
PART=1
SIZE=1024
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd$DRIVE$PART bs=1M count=$SIZE
here $DRIVE needs to be something like a b or c depending on how many drives you have and which one you want to zero out, and $PART needs to be some number corresponding to the partition on that drive you would like to zero out. Replace the a and 1 with whatever you may desire. $SIZE needs to be the number of megabytes in your partition desired to be erased.
Shown here is one gig being zeroed out from drive a (the first drive) and the first partition (the 1 in this)
Again though, if you can't even boot off of the cd, then wiping your drive probably isn't the problem, and if you can then you could just as easily re install ubuntu from the cd... But for your future reference above is how to wipe a drive
