How To Wipe Drive

[borgward]

I am returning my HDD to seagate. How do I wipe the drive before I send it off?

[thegreatgazoo]

Using any live CD
1. Open the terminal
2. Find the hard drive by typing this command: fdisk -l
3. Assuming that the drive is labeled "SDA", type the following command: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M

This will wipe your drive by writing zeros from the beginning to end. This will take a long time and no progress will be shown, when it is done it will return you to the command prompt.

Alternatively, you can download Darik's Boot n Nuke, and use that utility to wipe your disk.

with both of these methods it is very important to pick the right disk . if at all possible make sure it is the only disk in your computer.


Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

[MHull]

I seem to have two disks on my EeePc 1000 and I have managed to install Linux Mint 13 32 on both of them and now I need to start over again. My computer seems to only use the smaller of the disks which leads to memory problems.

I am looking at gParted on my system and it would appear that I have 2 hard disks...it says: icon (for hard disk) /dev/sda (9.52 GiB) and under that I have another identical icon /dev/sdb (30.06 GiB) and then under that what I assume is my 8GB usb stick since it says /dev/sdc (7.45 GiB)

How do I change all of this to give me access to the larger disk for my working disk?

[Pierre]

if, as per the heading of this topic, that you want to wipe/erase either drive,
then - from the live cd - click on the install icon & when prompted by the installer -
use the option 'erase-the-whole-disk' & allow the installer to proceed onwards.

probably best to select sda - as the drive to erase . . .

[MHull]

I did that before but chose overwrite all versions and ended up with the Linux installed on both drives but the computer only seems to use the smaller one which appears to still have the first version I installed on it. Any ideas on how to make the larger drive the main one?

[marsh20]

Hiya,

I would uplug the drive you don't wish to use, instal then once working reattached the smaller drive.

[MHull]

Ummm, both of these disks are internal on my little EeePc 1000. I don't have anything external to unplug. Unless there is some procedure you can recommend to do it? Also I'm wondering if these are really different drives or are they the famous partitions you all keep talking about? Although when I have a look at both of them, they both seem to have 3 different partitions on them. I'm still at square one I think....

[usbtux]

If you use Drak it will wipe all connected drives...

[thegreatgazoo]

Hi, it looks like you have 2 different questions here. Was your original question on how to wipe a drive for a return answered?

About your eeepc. They came with 2 ssd drives. 1 small one soldered into the motherboard, and a larger drive that can be removed.

If you are looking to start from scratch and erase both drives, using the smaller one for your install and the larger one for your personal files do the following.

Boot up a live USB of your choice
Open gparted and find the smaller drive
Delete any existing partitions
Create 1 partition formatted to ext4
Do not create a swap ( the drive is to small for it)
Hit apply
Now find the larger drive
Delete everything any existing partitions
Create a 2GB swap partition
Create a ext4 partition with the rest of the free space
Hit apply

Run the Linux Mint installer
When it comes time to choose a disk, select custom or " something else"
Double click on the smaller partition and select " use as /"
Now double click the largest partition and select " use as /home/"

There is a selector for the boot loader. Make sure it's the same as the smaller drive that your system is going to get installed on. (Example SDA)

Continue on with the installation.

[MHull]

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!! I seem to have managed to do everything in your instructions and so far so good! I haven't shut down yet and restarted but the restart following installation went perfectly. YAY