fbi-style format

Dave Lohran · 10-06-2005, 02:18 PM

Okay, I have a thumb drive, and I screwed it up a bit on the filesystem.
So, I'm just gonna go ahead and format and start again, but I screwed with the mbr and stuff, so I wanna just go ahead and do an fbi-style format where you write zeros all through it.
Would something like:
dd if=/dev/zero/ of=/dev/sda work?

dracolich · 10-06-2005, 02:50 PM

As long as it can still be detected as a dev that will work. But if the mbr is screwed up it might not. Before you try dd do 'cat /proc/partitions' to make sure the partition table has been read. It should be something more like sdb1 instead of sdb. And "fbi-style" would be more like thre or four passesof writing zeros. Some people use random instead of zero.