I recently had a HDD failure in an LVM (ext4) array.

After sorting out the array, I thought I'd stick the drive into a docking station to have a closer look.

e2fsck reported a bad superblock and "no such directory" for the device.

I spent a couple of fruitless days with our friend e2fsck, mkfs, Google, Gparted, Gnome-disk-util and finally testdisk researching and testing to see if the HDD could be revived and reformatted.

Testdisk finally informed me that the disk might be unrecoverable and lost.

About to give up I plugged the docking station into a Win10 machine and opened Disk Manager. It told me the HDD needed initialisation.

I did that, and it was back. I formatted it to NTFS. That took awhile, but all good. Further checks with SMART and other utilities tell me HDD is fine, although SMART says there was one failure in the past

To my question; is there a utility or command under Linux that would do what Win10 did, i.e. "initialise" a HDD in this simple manner?

Thanks

If it was part of an array under LVM, there was a bunch of (incomplete) meta-data that various components were trying to make sense of. Win10 just ignored it. To do the same simply use dd to zero the first few hundred MB of the disk. Then use gparted/fdisk to set up a partition table, then proceed as normal.

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Thanks