My friend let me borrow a roughly 8 gig harddrive to mess around with installing linux on. I read on here about zero filling to clean the drive up to get it ready to install on. They mentioned doing it from a live cd distro. But i asssume that is if your doing it to the only drive in the box. My question is can i do it from fedora core 2 on the first drive. Also i used dmesg to see if the install went alright.

hdb: 16514064 sectors (8455 MB) w/512KiB Cache, CHS=16383/16/63
hdb: hdb1

with that line i assume it is refering to the second drive. But i want to know if there any commands more gear towards harddrives that would let me inspect it moreso? And one last question is when i install a distro would it ask me where to install or do i have to do something special to make sure it installs on the second harddrive? I don't want to accidently overwrite anything, that is why im borrowing the drive.

i tried using the zero fill technique to clean my drive that i saw in a tutorial on LQ. the command is:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda/ bs=1M

when i tried it said " dd: opening `/dev/zero/': Not a directory"

If i create that directory will the zero fill work? I don't really understand what that command means just that it would supposedly clean my harddrive.

here is where i heard about this from.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...icle&artid=329

You don't have to zero fill the drive to install linux on it. Just be sure to select manual partitioning during the install and be sure that the partitions you create for linux are on the drive which you want to use. That's most likely /dev/hdb in your case.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=512 count=1
That doesn't really zero the drive, just the MBR and partition table of that drive.
If you really really really do need to zero the drive, which you don't then you need to do abit more searching.