On Thu, 27 Dec 2001, Keith Morse wrote: > On Thu, 27 Dec 2001, rpjday wrote: > > > On Thu, 27 Dec 2001, Jackrabbit Slim wrote: > > > > > if I run it like this: > > > > > > # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 > > > > > > it will convert the entire hard drive to zeros right? If I do that would I > > > be able to rebuild partitions and the partition table from fdisk? > > > > ouch. boy, you really are on a mission here. the only issue is that > > you would also zero the final two bytes of the MBR, which are x"aa55", > > the standard signature of a PC's master boot record. i don't know > > enough about whether certain programs require that signature to be > > present to recognize a boot record, so i'd be *very* reluctant to > > overwrite them. > > > > but i don't see why you'd need to zero the *entire* disk, when zeroing > > the disk's partition table is effectively doing the same thing. > > > > rday > > > Well, since the topic was broached. Would doing this be a satisfactory > way of "zeroing" out the hard drive (no data retrevial possible) if the > system was being sent to salavage (sold off)?
that would be a relatively safe way, yes. for efficiency sake, if you're going to do any sizable transfers with "dd", use a bigger blocksize, like bs=100k or something. the difference is noticeable. rday p.s. i say "relatively" safe since computer forensics is allegedly capable of extracting data from a "zeroed" disk by detecting lingering magnetic values. but this is not something you should worry about if you're just going to give the disk away to charity or something. _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
