[NTLUG:Discuss] Formatting hard drive

[Patrick R. Michaud]

A quick Google search came for "clean hard drive dd" came
up with "DiskZapper" -- a freeware utility for wiping hard
drives to binary zero from a boot floppy or CD.  It's described at 
http://www.icewalkers.com/Linux/Software/519960/Diskzapper.html ,
or do a Google search for "diskzapper".

Personally I've often used the dd(1) command to wipe hard drives;
I'll boot with the RH install disks but abort the installation after
a shell prompt is available on an alternate console (Shift+Alt+F3,
I think), then I run a command similar to

   # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1

to fill /dev/hda1 with binary zeroes.  One could probably add bs= and
count= options to dd(1) to get it to run a bit quicker.

Pm
--------------
Patrick R. Michaud, Ph.D, RHCE #808002519807115
Web:   http://www.pmichaud.com
Email: pmichaud at pobox.com
  

On Mon, Dec 22, 2003 at 10:41:01AM -0800, Philip Stetz wrote:
> I was in the middle of doing a clean install of RH 9
> and had a huge change of heart ... deciding to dump RH
> in favor of Suse.  I basically got as far as deleting
> the partitions and starting to install grub.  No big
> deal, I have backed up everything anyways.
> 
> So now I would like to wipe everything off my hard
> drive (including MBR) and start over from scratch. 
> Anyone know of any good tools I can use to create a
> boot floppy and reformat my drive with?
> 
> Thanks,
> Phil
> 
> 
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