[Re: drives]

[Ben Pfaff]

Matt Graham <danceswithcrows@usa.net> writes:

> Ben Pfaff <pfaffben@msu.edu> wrote:
> > "Marcel Kunath" <kunathma@pilot.msu.edu> writes:
> > 
> >> Now today I had a drive I had a partition table on and wanted to wipe 
> >> and then
> >> use the drive once again without partition table but I couldn't figure 
> >> out how.
> > 
> > To wipe a partition table:
> > 	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<disk> bs=1024 count=1024
> 
> [PEDANTIC] This will get not just the partition table, but the entire first
> megabyte of the drive.  The boot sector and partition table for an x86 reside
> in the first 512 bytes on the disk.  [/PEDANTIC]

Yes.  However under certain conditions I've seen weird stuff
happen if I didn't wipe more of the disk than that.  I can't
remember the weird stuff exactly or even the conditions, and this
was several years ago, though...