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iam trying to perform a dd command on a already partition hard drive.
i gave the following command dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
but iam not able to zero out the MBR record present in sda. Iam not able to copy zero bytes to my sda partition , so that i can reinstall.
Do let me know if there is something missing here..
The MBR is just 512 bytes at the start of the disk. So, if your disk is sda, then
"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1" will put zeroes on those first 512 bytes.
Same goes for a partition:
"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=1024"
will overwrite partition sda1 with zeroes.
You'll need to boot with a Live CD such as Knoppix or even Tom's RTB. Or, as I would do, boot with the Slackware install CD1 and when you login as root, issue the command(s).
iam trying to perform a dd command on a already partition hard drive.
i gave the following command dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
but iam not able to zero out the MBR record present in sda. Iam not able to copy zero bytes to my sda partition , so that i can reinstall.
Do let me know if there is something missing here..
Regards,
Srihari.
What happended when you ran the command? How do you know that it did not write the zeros?
Note: It's not a good idea to run dd on a drive that is in use. Much better to run from a live CD, or another disk.
Also, If you just want to install GRUB to the mbr, it's not necesary to erase it first.
The actual problem here was the /dev/sda1 files where not proper,i mean they were all corrupted. stat command on each of those files failed which meant the files were either corrupt or not created properly.
So whenever i create the new partition setup i end up doing a
/dev/sda* . i remove all the sda files and then create the file as
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