| 1 |
On 04/03/2017 09:11 PM, Harry Putnam wrote: |
| 2 |
> I probably should know this, but off the top of my head I don't |
| 3 |
> remember ever running into anything like this. |
| 4 |
> |
| 5 |
> I'd like to do what ever is done to set a used disk back to the |
| 6 |
> state it was in when new... Not sure what that state is, but at least |
| 7 |
> no evidence of boot manager or fs having been installed. |
| 8 |
|
| 9 |
You can use cfdisk (or another partitioning tool) and delete all partitions. |
| 10 |
|
| 11 |
Then, delete the MBR (Master Boot Record), which is where boot managers |
| 12 |
put themselves. You do that with: |
| 13 |
|
| 14 |
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/your_hard_disk bs=446 count=1 |
| 15 |
|
| 16 |
It's not necessary to write zeroes all over the disk. You only need to |
| 17 |
delete the partitions and the boot manager, unless you also want to make |
| 18 |
the old data on the disk irrecoverable instead of it just appearing |
| 19 |
empty out of the box. In that case, following the advise of the other |
| 20 |
posters here and write zeroes all over the disk with dd is a good idea. |
Archives