Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

baslinux - Re: [BL] hd problem

baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Baslinux mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] hd problem
  • Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 15:51:11 +0000 (UTC)

On Thu, 22 Feb 2007, Samual Acorn wrote:

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hd? (forgot the exact procedure but you need
to specify disk length... i think... you'll need to look that one up)
then a zero wipe dd if=/dev/zero .... would result in -complete-
destruction of the data without destroying the drive... make sure to
use the device name and not the partition name so that partition and
all are wiped...
......................

On 25/02/05, sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
I need to correct something I posted - the Seagate Disk Manager does do
more than partition. The next Seagate drive I tried to use had no
partition table either. DM let me 'restore MBR from backup' which took
about a second, instead of needing to low-level format (which DM also
does). I then partitioned with BL2 floppy disk fdisk in another 30 sec or
so (instead of 30 min with PQMagic).
........................


Something apparently went wrong when I posted a comment to a DIFFERENT 2005 list posting, in which I asked if dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda, which David Moberg called a 'midlevel' format, was just as good as the 'lowlevel' format provided by four of our older computers. And this other mail was resent to the list instead. A bug? Or maybe I did something really stupid, for which I apologize.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024 count=1 was suggested for just deleting the partition table on disks that tell fdisk they have 3GB of partitions on a 1.2GB drive. Followed by cfdisk -z (ignore existing partition table, since there no longer is one and cfdisk looks for it otherwise), and mke2fs (partition and format).

lowlevel format (using BIOS on our computers) marks bad sectors, but I think mke2fs -c during formatting should do the same. Am I wrong?

PQMAGIC also marks bad sectors while formatting.

dd takes up much less space than four computers.

Sindi




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page