Best way to wipe HD

I'm having some problems with FCS and am going to wipe the HD and reinstall SL and only the apps I need. What the best way to do this? Can I only erase the Start up drive if I boot from the SL disc....if so how do you do that? Do I erase and keep the disk as OS extended (journaled)? Any other advice would be appreciated on this procedure.
I have backed up all my important docs etc!
Thanks

a wipe an erase might be an overkill but that's your call. i would suggest you do a full backup first before you try it. that is assuming there is any data on the drive you want to keep. use either Time Machine or a 3rd party backup like CCCloner or Superduper to back up. also, I don't understand what you mean by "only erasing the startup drive". is your hard drive partitioned?
to do a wipe and install boot from the SL DVD and start disk utility from the Utilities menu. assuming your hard rive is not currently partitioned I would reformat the whole drive at this point. select the whole drive (model, not name) and click on the partition tab. set the number of partitions to 1, format to mac os extended journaled, click on "options" and set the partition scheme to GUID (it should be that already). then click "apply". when done, quit disk utility and proceed with the install.

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