Baslinux mailing list

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

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