On 04/03/2017 09:11 PM, Harry Putnam 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.
You can use cfdisk (or another partitioning tool) and delete all partitions.
Then, delete the MBR (Master Boot Record), which is where boot managers
put themselves. You do that with:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/your_hard_disk bs=446 count=1
It's not necessary to write zeroes all over the disk. You only need to
delete the partitions and the boot manager, unless you also want to make
the old data on the disk irrecoverable instead of it just appearing
empty out of the box. In that case, following the advise of the other
posters here and write zeroes all over the disk with dd is a good idea.
