Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Fri, 13 May 2005, David Moberg wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "sindi keesan" <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
>
> > Can I somehow wipe out this monster with dd from BL instead?  Where
> > might the DDO be located and can I just write zeros over that part?
> >   Is the MBR the first 1024 bytes, or half that?  Could I damage
> > anything important, irretrievably, by trying dd if=/dev/zero
> > of=/dev/hda bs=1024 count=1?
>
> Could you back up everything and wipe the whole disk instead? Writing
> to the MBR is almost guaranteed to destroy any partitioning that you
> may have on there.
>
> David

The drive came from a neighbor's computer that we recycled and has nothing 
of interest to us on it, just Win98.  We plan to partition and format with 
FreeDOS and then copy my DOS files over from the second computer, where 
the DOS drive is still functioning, but probably not for long, according 
to spinrite, and it already had a messed-up partition table once.  Or I 
may use it to replace the linux drive on the first computer, which again 
has a third partition which is 'larger than the drive'.  Of four drives, 
one is okay but spinrite can't find it nor can ltools.  I had better check 
out this latest drive before using it, with spinrite.

How would I 'wipe the whole disk'? Zero it all with dd?  Is this 
significantly better than just zeroing the first 512K and repartitioning 
and reformatting?  It would take at least an hour, I think.  I did 
something of the sort to another drive when it had FAT table problems - 
which may be the drive that just died, or the one with the too-large 
partition.  I should keep better records if not better drives.

Low-level format took several hours to get rid of EZ-DRIVE but at least 
that let us boot from floppy disk.  Here I would need to boot to hard 
drive, hit space bar to boot from linux boot floppy, then use fdisk on it.
Anyone know why the low-level format program in the BIOS would not work on 
the DDO, is it protecting itself somehow?  I hope it is not dd-proof.
Sindi