I've done some searches for a command that used to be on here but can no longer find it (I even had it book marked)

It gave a consule command to set all sectors to 0 on a slave drive or partition and explained which letters to change to acheive it.

If anyone has it or knows it, I would love to get it again (i'll write it down in a text book cover this time)

Cheers
Phil

dd if=/dev/zero of=<hard drive or partition to 0 fill)

Make sure you set of correctly, or you will likely wipe out something important. Note that residual data can be recovered even from a zero filled sector on a hard drive, but it requires special tools. If you require absolute security, wipe with a program that writes over the drive repeatedly with random data.

There are a variety of utilities for this purpose, One is:

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

My hdd's are listed as hda and hdb (using Xandros 2) i'll assume (the mother of all disasters) that this is a fairly global label for hdd's. So if I add hdb to the end of the command, that will zap the one I want. Or have I missed the bus?


dd if=/dev/zero of=hdb

PS Have download dban as well, would rather have a go with a command 1st though. Cheers.

you forgot the full path of the device:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb

What is that you want to do exactly ? Delete the contents of the whole drive or just a partition ?
If it is the whole drive, follow the instruction by btmiller or barrett9h.

If it is just a partition then be careful. For eg. if you have 5 partitions on a drive say hada1, hda2, hda3, hda4, hda5 & hda6 (hda4 being the extended partition) and if you want to zero out hda5 then, using dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda5 would zero out the contents of the partition hda5 including the partition table which would point at partition hda6. Which means, you'd lose the partition hda6 as you zeroed out the partition table which pointed at hda6.

To make sure you skip the partition table do the following:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda6 bs=512 skip=1

Of course, you'll have to know the drive name and partition number be it hda3, hdb3 or sda3 or whatever. The above explanation assumes hda as the drive name.

If you need further clarifications, provide the details of your hard drives and partitions layout and also, which of the partitions you wanna zero out.

in general, the rule of thumb (the father of all disasters ) is that hd* is labelled after the onboard ide chain.

ide0 master = hda
ide0 slave = hdb
ide1 master = hdc
ide1 slave = hdd

do, however, always doublecheck, if you blank the worng drive, its remarkably upsetting. oh, and if you have bizarre hardware configurations, this will go right out the window.

That is maybe the best sig I have seen in a long time.....

From the galloping nitpicker: There is a difference between erasing and wiping. Writing all zeros is not considered 100% secure. Utilities like dban do multiple writes to ensure no residual data can be found.

And of course, just deleting file and partitions still leaves the data on the disk where it can easily be recovered.

Just want to delete a slave drive. It has a botched duel boot install on it that isn't worth trying to retrieve. It's not national securtity by any means. Just want it blankish with peice of mind to play with another distro.

I've written (the old way, with a pen)down the commands and other info for keeps.

Cheers and thankyou all that replied.
Happy camper.