how do you wipe your hdrive in terminal

[convulution]

i need to wipe my hard drive because an older version of ubuntu is making it so that i cannot download 10.10 how fix

[convulution]

found this just now will it fix my problem You need to figure our the correct hard drive to wipe. If you wipe the wrong hard drive, that data will not be recoverable, so exercise caution!

In the terminal window, type in:

sudo fdisk -l

A list of your hard drives will show up. A few factors will help you identify the right hard drive. One is the file system, found in the System column of the list – Windows hard drives are usually formatted as NTFS (which shows up as HPFS/NTFS). Another good identifier is the size of the hard drive, which appears after its identifier (highlighted in the following screenshot).

sshot-12

In our case, the hard drive we want to wipe is only around 1 GB large, and is formatted as NTFS. We make a note of the label found under the the Device column heading. If you have multiple partitions on this hard drive, then there will be more than one device in this list.

The wipe developers recommend wiping each partition separately.

To start the wiping process, type the following into the terminal:

sudo wipe <device label>

In our case, this is:

sudo wipe /dev/sda1

Again, exercise caution – this is the point of no return!

sshot-13

Your hard drive will be completely wiped. It may take some time to complete, depending on the size of the drive you’re wiping.

[nujinini]

Hi!

You can also execute:

# dd if=zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

Make sure you change /dev/sda to the correct partition you are trying to wipe.

What's the output of:

# fdisk -l

l = small L

[oz]

If you are running the command given above under Ubuntu, don't forget that you'll need to add sudo to the command:

sudo dd if=zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

This question has been asked and answered lots of times on these forums, so you can do a forum search for more info on the subject.

[kakariko81280]

That dd command will only wipe the first block of data from the disk, which will not delete any data. It wouldn't even present a problem remounting the drive.

There is a long explanation here: http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/ubu...tml#post604008

[coopstah13]

there are two things wrong with that command, as said by kakariko, it will only erase the partition table of the disk, which isn't the same as wiping the disk

second, if needs to be /dev/zero, not just zero

if you want to wipe a disk fully, it will have to be

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX

where X is the disk letter of the disk you want to wipe

I'm curious why an old version of ubuntu is preventing you from downloading the new version though