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GloomyBear 10-21-2013 06:33 AM
Low Level Format from a live USB
 
Hello,
Please how do use low level format for my 80GB Hitachi HDD using dd?
shall I use
Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
or
Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
? is it possible to do it from a live USB?
I know using
Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
i'm gonna erase all the data, that's exactly what i want
and 1 more questions, when using one of the commands below what will happen?
Thank you in advance

TenTenths 10-21-2013 06:57 AM
None of your commands will "format" a drive, they will simply fill the disk with 0's which will erase your disk but will not allow you to write anything to it until you create and format a partition with a valid file system.

TobiSGD 10-21-2013 08:44 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by GloomyBear (Post 5049578)
shall I use
Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
This will only overwrite the first 512 bytes on that disk, clearing out the MBR and partition table, but your data will be still there and is very easy to recover. The second command
Quote:
Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
will overwrite all data with zeroes on the disk. To get better performance I recommend to use a larger blocksize, depending on your hardware you will get best performance somewhere between 8 and 32MB:
Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=16M

jefro 10-21-2013 03:23 PM
I haven't seen any low level format tools in a while. dd is not a low level format.

There are many ways to use a live cd/dvd/usb to do a very good erase on a hard drive. Most live distro's can even add on a few apps in live if you have enough ram.

I think ultimate boot cd is usuful. http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/


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