cleaning off unix/linux????

[Gary Kline]

On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 09:57:44PM -0400, John Nielsen wrote:
> Quoting Gary Kline <kline at 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 at thought.org   www.thought.org     Public service Unix