Can I format a disk from GRUB?

Question

Opensuse 11.4 seems to be creating problems with booting from USB devices. (I have read in a couple places that people are having similar problems.)

Every time I try to boot from a different live USB image, I see a GRUB screen flash and the hard disk starts to boot up.
The only live image I have had success with booting was another OpenSuse 11.4, then I got the options to install or run live.
I was thinking of just wiping the hard disk and seeing if that made a difference.
Can I get into the grub limited command line, can i format from here?
Is some other way of installing over the WAN from inside the Suse OS?

Solution

Grub is a bootloader, not a formatter. If you can run gparted from the Grub command line, then you're in luck.

EDIT:

Some Googling leads me to believe that you might be able to do it, but I'm not sure. See this list from the GRUB manual of the available commands in GRUB. It seems that you can make new partitions but I don't know if you can format existing ones.

Comments

[fightermagethief]

cant run gparted, i dont think i have root filesystem loadedm i get options such as blocklist, boot, cat, chainloader, cmp, color... there is a terminal option, but if i type it, it just says: console and nothing happens

[Simon Hughes]

@bboyreason - See my edit. There's a list of GRUB commands available in the GRUB manual.