Delete everything on hda

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
This will completely erase everything on your hard drive and is not reversible.

-2
By: cd
2009-02-16 00:04:23
dd
12

1 Alternatives + Submit Alt

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.
sunny256 · 776 weeks and 3 days ago
scary, but cool =). @sunny256: nice tip =)
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What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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