Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 14:16:54 -0700 From: Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org> To: John Nielsen <lists@jnielsen.net> Cc: Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org>, FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: cleaning off unix/linux???? Message-ID: <20060521211653.GC30259@thought.org> In-Reply-To: <20060520215744.9g32voga8ssc8s04@newwebmail.jnielsen.net> References: <20060520234655.GA9962@thought.org> <20060520215744.9g32voga8ssc8s04@newwebmail.jnielsen.net>
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On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 09:57:44PM -0400, John Nielsen wrote: > Quoting Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org>: > > > Gang, > > > > A 40G drive that I thought was bad (when trying to install W2K > > on the drive) may be entirely good. I am trying to avoid having > > to buy a DOS/Win platform. I've had both W2K and FBSD or Ubuntu > > on this one machine. For various reasons I need one DOS machine. > > (Already have 7 or 8 *Nix servers.) The Windows 2000 > > "Professional" CD find some other non-Windows partition and > > press "D" and "L" as I will, the installation CD keeps > > complaining. Eventually I have to hit F3 to quit. So, nutshell, > > is there any way I can completely remove any trace of *Nix? > > -----I remember having a DOS floppy and typing an undocumented > > MBR \ command that wiped the drive clean of this boot record, > > but this was [mumble] years ago. > > Boot to a recent FreeBSD Install CD (with the Rescue tools on disk 1) > or a not-so-recent FreeBSD Rescue CD, and go to rescue mode. > > After verifying the device name of the drive you're trying to "clean" > (using dmesg and/or fdisk), do this (I'm assuming a single drive, ad0): > > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=32k count=1 > > That will overwrite the first 32k of the drive with zeroes. That > should wipe out the MBR and the partition table. Since you want the > drive to be "clean" anyway, it doesn't hurt to make the bs or count > values higher. To zero out the entire drive, you could do this: > > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=1m > > (With no "count" option it will write to the end of the device.) > > Doing any of this on a drive with data you care about is of course > contraindicated. > This looks like the best way of getting rid of the master boot rec; thanks. gary > JN -- Gary Kline kline@thought.org www.thought.org Public service Unix
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