how do i zero out a drive?

sde · 08-16-2002, 09:19 AM

i need to do a low level format to a drive, .. how do i do it? is that the same as "zero"ing out a drive?

revolution · 08-16-2002, 10:56 AM

ive got a program that will do that for ya, catch me on irc and ill send it to ya

sde · 08-16-2002, 11:10 AM

that would be cool to have, but i was hoping there would be a way so i could do it in OS/X =P

i need to format a drive here at work, but windoze won't do it right.

sdeming · 08-16-2002, 12:01 PM

Format it how? As in wipe it clean, partition it, label it, and install filesystems?

OS/X is Darwin is FreeBSD so you can look at these commands:

- disklabel
- fdisk

I am pretty sure disklabel is what you want, but no positive.

sde · 08-16-2002, 12:28 PM

thanks scott, .. i'm gonna try it out now

sde · 08-16-2002, 12:44 PM

doh! there are a few osx boxes here, but osx will not let you log in as root in darwin, and you have to be root to run fdisk.

maybe this should be a mac thread =)

bdl · 08-16-2002, 05:03 PM

Best way I've found to wipe a drive, data, partition table and all is to just use the 'dd' command under linux (or possibly BSD, I can't confirm atm). You just issue the command

[SHELL]
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1M count=38172
[/SHELL]

Where the device is your drive device and the count value is the size of your hdd.
Some SCSI controllers also have this function built in, when you boot up and enter the SCSI utility screen you'll see it.

kenshi · 08-20-2002, 06:29 AM

Low-level formats are when you actually form the tracks on a disk. This is very rarely something you need to do, so you're probably talking about something else. And if you did for some reason need to do it, you'd have to get a program from the manufacturer of the hard drive. (Different hard drives have different programs.)

sde · 08-20-2002, 07:44 AM

yes, it is something i need to do. i'm doing some product testing for a proprietary product, and this drive we are using won't take a format from this prototype after it's been formatted on windows.

we ordered the software from ibm, but they are lagging and i was hoping to find a quick way. but i guess i'll still have to wait.

bdl · 08-20-2002, 05:24 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by mmilano
yes, it is something i need to do. i'm doing some product testing for a proprietary product, and this drive we are using won't take a format from this prototype after it's been formatted on windows.

we ordered the software from ibm, but they are lagging and i was hoping to find a quick way. but i guess i'll still have to wait.

Using the 'dd' command as outlined above wipes the HDD and fills it with 'zero'. No MBR, no partition table, just zeros, as if it was a new drive. Whats wrong with that?

kenshi · 08-22-2002, 04:44 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by mmilano
yes, it is something i need to do. i'm doing some product testing for a proprietary product, and this drive we are using won't take a format from this prototype after it's been formatted on windows.

If you already have Windows running on it properly, then you do not need a low-level format. A low-level format is for repairing physical damage to the disk. If you perform a surface scan in Windows scandisk and it says certain sectors are damaged, then a low-level format may fix it. If a surface scan says everything checks out ok, then you should definately not do a low-level format as it's dangerous like flashing the Bios.

You probably want to do what bdl suggests. It's what I consider a mid-level format. In case you can't put another hard drive in the machine with Linux on it, there are several varients of it that run on floppy disks including Trinux (which I've tried myself, though the spelling may not be right). You simply download floppy images and copy them (with dd in unix or rawrite in Windows) and you're ready to go. It's the only way I can think to do it since Windows doesn't have a program for writing directly to the disk. (I once wrote a program myself in assembler that did it, but I lost that program about a year ago.)

sde · 08-22-2002, 07:44 AM

the humorous results:

it was all about this ibm drive we needed to format. we needed to get it to the original state that it was when sent from the manufacturer. we tested it in a couple products and reformatted it in windows because they said it was a window format.

well after a week of going back and forth, we figured out it was shipped with a fat16 format

needless to say, you are right, .. i didn't need a low level format.