[CLUE-Tech] Clear HDD of old OS, etc?

[Gary Threlkeld]

Like Ed, I too had problems reloading a Windoze version to a disk
after it had been used for Linux.  I had both a Maxtor drive and a
Western Digital.  Each had a low-level format program that I could 
get off the vendor's web that cured the problem.

Is this an option???

Gary T. Threlkeld    gthrelk at attbi.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ed Hill" <ed at eh3.com>
To: "CLUE TECH" <clue-tech at clue.denver.co.us>
Sent: Friday, May 31, 2002 12:01 PM
Subject: Re: [CLUE-Tech] Clear HDD of old OS, etc?


> On Fri, 2002-05-31 at 11:41, Warren wrote:
> > Dave Price <davep at kinaole.org> wrote:
> > 
> >  > dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hdX 
> >  > Is there maybe a better dd invocation ?
> > 
> > Can't you just do an 'fdisk /mbr' ?
> 
> 
> Heres a better command which will write all zeros to the first 100
> 512-byte blocks:
> 
>   dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX bs=512 count=100
> 
> In the past, when loading NT 4.0 on to a disk formerly used by Linux, I
> had all sorts of problems.  Even after using "fdisk /mbr" and doing a
> fresh NT 4.0 install, the NT boot loader had problems.  Apparently,
> there was still conflicting junk left in the boot sector of the disk.
> 
> My solution at the time was to run the above dd command.  After the
> fact, I found out that some disk manufacturers (eg. IBM) ship a DOS
> utility that will "zero" a disk in a nearly identical fashion to the dd
> command.  In fact, this all-zeros-in-the-boot-sector is the condition
> that the disk is supposed to be in when shipped (brand new).
> 
> hth,
> Ed
> 
> -- 
> Edward H. Hill III, PhD    |  Email:       ed at eh3.com, ehill at mines.edu
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