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Delete everything on hda

Terminal - Delete everything on hda
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
2009-02-16 00:04:23
User: cd
Functions: dd
-2
Up
Down
Delete everything on hda

This will completely erase everything on your hard drive and is not reversible.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There is 1 alternative - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=16M
2009-11-09 00:13:35
User: Clopnixus
Functions: dd
-3
Up
Down
Delete everything on hda

If you leave out the block size it defaults to 512 bytes. I set it to 16 Megabytes and it was much faster...

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

This is in fact a useful command, and often used when giving away or scrapping computers. But doing this while the system runs from a partition on /dev/hda will probably lead to some sort of kernel panic, and the command will be interrupted before the whole disk is erased. I'd recommend running it from a bootable CD like Knoppix, or at least set the system into single user mode with "telinit 1" first.

And yes, doing it only once should be enough, check out http://16systems.com/zero.php (The great zero challenge) for more info.

Comment by sunny256 154 weeks and 6 days ago

scary, but cool =). @sunny256: nice tip =)

Comment by nickleus 132 weeks and 3 days ago

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