"Clearing" a Linux Hard Drive

[OldBob]

I have second hard drive on my desktop that I use to try various Linux distros. After many successful and failed installations the drive is a mess of various partitions. Right now I can't even install a Live CD.

Since this drive has never had a Windows OS installed, my "old standby" a Win98SE boot floppy won't work. Can't find a FAT.

How can I "erase & format" this drive for a fresh start ???

[oz]

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

...that should wipe the drive giving you a fresh start.

Change the device to match your own device.

[OldBob]

Ozar,

As a "newbie", I don't even understand that command ?

[TheBigPhish]

well, what's the OS on the OTHER HD? Lets see what does boot, if anything at all...

If it's THAT far gone, i recommend Knoppix..which will boot (pretty sure it boots w/o a HD even in the system)... and then some quick work with cfdisk will put you back in the game...

[questio verum]

Ozar,
I'm always hungry to learn something new, so I'm going to do some digging & see if I can decipher that command string you posted. In the meantime though, if a system won't boot a LiveCD (not sure why that would happen) what tool would you use to bring up a shell to enter that command?

Having come from a dos/windows background, in the past I would've been scrambling for a custom configured CD boot floppy or a BartPE bootable CD to give me a command shell where I would use dos-based tools to clean things up.

But... that was then. This is now. I'm trying to break my reliance on ms & ms commercial software. So if I want to return a sick partition table to health using only open-source tools, what would be my approach?

THX

qv

[bigtomrodney]

Is the problem here that you can't boot a livecd or that you can't install?

If you can't boot that will be a different problem altogether. As an explanation of Oz's command...

This is an old trick. /dev/zero is a virtual device that produces zeroes and dd is 'disk duplicator' which is used for copying disks, files and streams. Using the command above copies zeroes over master boot record, nulling everything. All partitions and tables are wiped leaving the disk effectively empty.

A non-functional pseudo command to help understand would be something like :-

diskduplicator inputfile=zeroes outputfile=harddisk bytesize=the_size_of_your_master_boot_record count=1

[oz]

Here's an article that goes into some detail for anyone interested:

Software Tip: Wipe a hard drive completely before donating it, for free - Software Tips, Tricks, and How-tos at CNET.

[questio verum]

Is the problem here that you can't boot a livecd or that you can't install?

No problems here, just trying to learn something. Thanks for breaking that line down, btw.

Purely by coincidence, I stopped by Distrowatch just before hitting the forum, and I learned of the existence of partedmagic. I had previously downloaded parted, qparted, and was in the process of gathering various filesystem tools to make a similar repair & configuration disc. Now I find it's already been done. cool.

[oz]

Purely by coincidence, I stopped by Distrowatch just before hitting the forum, and I learned of the existence of partedmagic.

The Parted Magic LiveCD is a great tool to keep on hand for working with Linux and/or Windows partitions. I routinely recommend it to others here on the forums.

[OldBob]

Sorry Guys,

I gave up on clearing HD and replaced it with another spare I had on hand.

With "new" HD distro installed with no problem.

Background Info:

My desktop includes a Romtec Trios hard drive switcher, [this is a push button switch box that allows one of three drives to connect to mobo]

The present set up is:

#1 - 40 gig with Win98SE
#2 - 20 gig [dual boot] backup copy Win98SE & Red Hat 8.0
#3 - 10 gig with PClinuxOS - 2007

#3 drive was "problem" trying to remove Xandros and install PClinuxOS. "Old" RH is from CDs in a Linux manual I bought at Waldens. I buy 10 gig HDs at local computer show $10 -$15.