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Installation - How to ABSOLUTELY blank a drive?

klappy - 19.05.2006, 00:13 Uhr
Titel: How to ABSOLUTELY blank a drive?

Hi All,

I'm new to all this and used Kanotix from CD, out of interest and just for very light tinkering since I got 2005-3. Effectively I don't know it at all.

I decided I'd like to get it on the drive and learn a lot more.

That is proving a problem. I've tried all day and I've seen bits of the drive that I can get to, and then the whole drive but could not play with it at all. I've had the drive vanish completely at times too.

I'm looking ofr a totally fool proof way to blank this drive and start over for a kanotix only install.

fdsik and cfdisk can't access the drive since parted tried to set things up. I think parted has caused something not expected to happen to the drive.

It's a 5Gb drive in an older laptop. Mostly Kanotix has run fine with it in just about all respects.

Using parted has me bewildered, I really can't get to grips with it for some reason that feels like a lack of sensible feedback - biggest trouble is getting it to unmount a drive, when you click on unmount it says mounted, and that's not really helping! ;O)

What can I try? I wanted to go further to learn, but can't go further becasue I need to learn, but what, and how if it won't let me?

I was going to set 4Gb as / and 512Mb or so as swap - I hope that's a sensible arangement for a 5GB drive?

slh - 19.05.2006, 01:05 Uhr
Titel: How to ABSOLUTELY blank a drive?

cat /dev/zero > /dev/<our disk, may it be hda, sda or whatever>
BE AWARE: this starts immediately blanking the WHOLE drive without any chance for restoring.

klappy - 19.05.2006, 03:01 Uhr
Titel: Re: How to ABSOLUTELY blank a drive?

slh hat folgendes geschrieben::

cat /dev/zero > /dev/<our disk, may it be hda, sda or whatever>
BE AWARE: this starts immediately blanking the WHOLE drive without any chance for restoring.

Thanks for the info.

Actually I had just solved it myself, and was logging in here to say so as well.

Some years ago, I used to use one of the Linux live CDs to save hard drives that had been messed up by that other OS. Oddly I just used the set up CD of that other OS (in it's latest version) to scrub the bogus partions that qtparted had allowed to be made! ;O)

How times change eh! ;O)

There's a lesson for me somewhere in there, and I'm no longer quite sure what I am going to do next.

michael7 - 19.05.2006, 04:12 Uhr
Titel: GParted

I would recommend GParted. It's a LiveCD and easier to use than QTParted. Small download-- 32 MB or so.

devil - 19.05.2006, 06:30 Uhr
Titel: GParted

klappy,
or go for cfdisk, which is very reliable. there is an easy howto here:
http://www.kanotix.com/FAQ-id_cat-63.html
look at the 2 at the bottom, cfdisk and format.

greetz
devil

schnorrer - 19.05.2006, 09:05 Uhr
Titel: GParted

to blank completely a HD, you schould know the numbers of the HD. Unmount The HD, and from commandline enter:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdTOBLANK bs=512 count=number_ of_block_ to_write

This clears completely all sektors on the entireHhD and takes between 2 and 30 minutes depending on the capacity of the HD.

slh - 19.05.2006, 09:59 Uhr
Titel: GParted

cat is usually quite a bit faster than dd due to better blocksize management.

schnorrer - 19.05.2006, 11:31 Uhr
Titel: GParted

may be, but with dd you realy erase all date incl. mbr what cat can't do

Roughnecks - 19.05.2006, 11:53 Uhr
Titel: Re: GParted

schnorrer hat folgendes geschrieben::

may be, but with dd you realy erase all date incl. mbr what cat can't do

wrong.

horo - 19.05.2006, 14:49 Uhr
Titel: Re: GParted

cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda

DON'T DO IT AT HOME, KIDS!

Ciao Martin