Quoting Gary Kline <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

        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.

JN
_______________________________________________
[email protected] mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"

Reply via email to