low level formatting in linux

Source: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/issue37/tag/38.html


dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

... to wipe out the whole first IDE drive, or

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

... to wipe out the whole first SCSI drive.

Actually you could just blow away one sector on these drives using

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda count=1

It wouldn't make sense to do this to other drives (/dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, /dev/sdb, etc) since their boot sectors aren't referenced as code and you can reformat those drives with normal DOS or Linux commands to re-make your filesystems on them. However, you can issue this command for all of your drives if you like. In fact you should be able to do something like:

for i in a b c d; do
 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd$i
done

... to get four IDE drives or

for i in a b c d e f g ; do
 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd$i
done

... to wipe out all seven disks on a SCSI chain.