On Mon, Apr 3, 2017 at 2:11 PM, Harry Putnam <rea...@newsguy.com> wrote: > I probably should know this, but off the top of my head I don't > remember ever running into anything like this. > > I'd like to do what ever is done to set a used disk back to the > state it was in when new... Not sure what that state is, but at least > no evidence of boot manager or fs having been installed. > > This if for something I'm doing on OS openindiana (a solaris offshoot) > and the disks are for that OS. > > The solaris milieu is somewhat behind linux in development of tools at > least in my opinion. That is why I'm asking here. > > I am a gentoo user as well, but expect I may have to boot the solaris > host with one or another linux boot ISO in order to have the tools > required.
If you are not worried about securely removing all data and simply want to fool fdisk into thinking your drive is empty, use the wipefs utility. This will zero-out key bytes like the MBR, partition table, filesystem magic numbers, etc. You'll want to run it once for each partition, and then once for the whole device. wipefs -a /dev/sdx1 wipefs -a /dev/sdx2 wipefs -a /dev/sdx If you ARE worried about securely removing data, see the other replies in this thread for better options.
