ubuntu 16.04

diggerdog · 10-27-2022, 06:11 AM

can i still get a disc with ubuntu 16.04 from anywhere. it had features that later disks do not have one option was to wipe clean a hard drive without installing anything.

i have an external 1tb drive that is corrupted with part loads of different installations. it is therefore useless. i want to wipe it clean so it is just 1tb of empty space so i can use it as an external hard rive again. does anybody know of another way of wiping the drive clean so i can use it as storage.

thanks digger

syg00 · 10-27-2022, 06:52 AM

Several options available;

Code:

wipefs -a -f /dev/<whatever>
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<whatever> c=1000 bs=1M

The latter is somewhat more of a sledgehammer.

Edit: forgot to mention - make sure you get <whatever> correct.

michaelk · 10-27-2022, 07:12 AM

Use gparted or whatever disk utility you like to create a new partition table, partition and then format as desired.

No need to actually wipe the drive.

syg00 · 10-27-2022, 07:15 AM

Be aware that (simply) creating a new partition table erases nothing - all the previous partitions (and data) magically re-appear. Not sure if current gparted rectifies that, it didn't used to.

michaelk · 10-27-2022, 07:57 AM

True, but if you erase all reference to the data it becomes inaccessible. If you create a new partition and format it with a filesystem it is impossible for the old data to magically re-appear without using some sort of data recovery utility.

rokytnji · 10-28-2022, 08:05 AM

https://archive.org/details/ubuntu-16.04.6-desktop-i386

pan64 · 10-28-2022, 09:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by diggerdog

can i still get a disc with ubuntu 16.04 from anywhere. it had features that later disks do not have one option was to wipe clean a hard drive without installing anything.

This is just false. You can clean any disk with almost any distro. And there are lot of different ways to achieve this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by diggerdog

i have an external 1tb drive that is corrupted with part loads of different installations. it is therefore useless. i want to wipe it clean so it is just 1tb of empty space so i can use it as an external hard rive again. does anybody know of another way of wiping the drive clean so i can use it as storage.

thanks digger

You only need to delete all the partitions (and probably the partition table) and create new one(s). But that was already explained

uteck · 10-28-2022, 09:47 AM

Use the best formatting tool around to make sure a disk is totally clean, DBAN: https://dban.org/