tried writing zreos to my HD but it denied permission

[SilenceHaSpoken]

I tried writing zreos to my HD but it denied permission. How do I get around that ?

[oz]

I tried writing zreos to my HD but it denied permission. How do I get around that ?

Hello and welcome to the forums!

You'll need root permissions to write zeros to your drive unless you do it from a liveCD. I personally recommend using the Parted Magic LiveCD. It comes with lots of nice utilities that are good to keep on hand.

For doing it without a liveCD, you can use su or sudo to gain the needed permissions.

[SilenceHaSpoken]

How do I go about doing that with su or sudo because I don't have CD's at the moment.

[oz]

How do I go about doing that with su or sudo because I don't have CD's at the moment.

Go to a terminal or console and issue the su command, or the sudo command if your system is setup for sudo:

su

...or

- su

then, enter your root password when requested and press ENTER, then you can enter your command to be executed



...or for sudo

sudo command_name

You can find some quick and easy lessons on using the command line under Linux here:

LinuxCommand.org: Learn the Linux command line

[SilenceHaSpoken]

Ok. Therein lies my problem, I'm just RUNNING Linux MINT 10 from the laptop. I tried deleting my partitions but it gave me some FATAL ERROR. That's when I tried the zeros in my hdd but it didn't work either. All I want to do is format my HD and install MINT with no problems.

[oz]

I'm just RUNNING Linux MINT 10 from the laptop. I tried deleting my partitions but it gave me some FATAL ERROR. That's when I tried the zeros in my hdd but it didn't work either. All I want to do is format my HD and install MINT with no problems.

Not sure that I'm following you properly.

Either way, the Linux Mint installer should offer a chance to partition and format your drive during the installation routine. You can choose to use the current partitions and the installer will overwrite them if that's what you want to do.

On the zeroing thing, if you want to clear the MBR (master boot record) only, leaving partition tables alone you can go to a terminal or console and enter the following command (needs root permissions as indicated earlier):

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1

To clear both, the MBR and partition tables, you can run the following command from a terminal:

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

You'll need to put sudo in front of whichever command you want to use if your system is setup to use sudo instead of ordinary root permissions. Otherwise, the commands should work as given. You'll get a short message about records in and records out, then your drive should be ready to go for installing the OS or distribution of your choice.

[SilenceHaSpoken]

I did it.. Thanks a lot man. I do appreciate it a great deal.