[Tfug] Cleaning old Windows Disks

[Jeff Coy]

Something like

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=32k count=1

should do the trick.  Just be sure /dev/sda is the device you want to go
away.

I usually do

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=8196m

and let it blast the whole disk.  That has the added benefit of finding out
if you have any bad sectors since they will error and then you'll know if
you should just scrap the drive.

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 12:18 PM, Kramer Lee <krameremark1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> It might hide in the first 63 sectors and fdisk leaves that alone
> because, in the old days, you might have EZbios installed so you could
> use a larger hard drive than the BIOS limit of the machine.  You can
> use dd to get rid of that if you boot from the Ubuntu CD.  You can
> write zeros to your whole disk with dd.  You just have to get the
> command parameters right.
>
> Kim
>
> On 5/19/10, Andrew Ayre <andy at britishideas.com> wrote:
> > Why not keep a copy of Darik's Boot and Nuke CD handy then?
> >
> > Andy
> >
> > earljviolet at deserthowler.com wrote:
> >> Mostly because I have a copy of Ubuntu 5.10 handy that I use for
> >> recovering data and stuff like that.
> >>
> >> Earl
> >>
> >> On Wed, May 19, 2010 9:12 pm, Andrew Ayre wrote:
> >>> Why not wipe them with Darik's Boot and Nuke then format?
> >>>
> >>> Andy
> >>>
> >>> earljviolet at deserthowler.com wrote:
> >>>> One of my duties at World Care is rebuilding old Windows computers.  I
> >>>> was
> >>>> recently told some of these disks might have root kits that can hide
> >>>> from
> >>>> Windows fdisk.  I have no clue as to what hides in Windows (nor do I
> >>>> really care).  I think using badblocks with -w option will clean off
> >>>> everything on the disk.  Does anyone know if I am right here?
> >>>>
> >>>> Earl
> >
> > --
> > Andy
> > PGP Key ID: 0xDC1B5864
> >
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