Unable to erase MBR

Raoul_Duke · Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2003 9:47 pm Post subject: Unable to erase MBR

fdisk won't erase my mbr.........any tips ?
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2003 10:49 pm Post subject:

Raoul_Duke,

Are you really sure you want to do this?
Read to the end of post and understand first.

As root, say
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

change /dev/hda to whichever drive you want to 'erase' the MBR of.

This will destroy your partition table, making the whole drive unreadable too.

Regards,

NeddySeagoon
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Moled · l33t Joined: 09 Jul 2003 Posts: 635

does your bios have some sort of "virus protection" to stop it being written to?

Raoul_Duke · Posted: Sat Aug 02, 2003 7:56 am Post subject:

Thanks for the tips guys......

I should have mentioned that i didn't need to keep the data on the drive or the partition table.........but embarrasingly enough, a win98 install disc blew the mbr away :oops:

But now i have a fresh gentoo install going through knoppix

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