Re: cleaning off unix/linux????

On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 09:57:44PM -0400, John Nielsen wrote:
Quoting Gary Kline <kline@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

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@xxxxxxxxxxx www.thought.org Public service Unix

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