Deleting partitons on a hard disk - all at once

Paul Howarth paul at city-fan.org
Thu Jun 16 10:15:57 UTC 2005


Neil Marjoram wrote:
> Quick question,
> 
> Can anyone tell me if there is a quick way to delete all partitions on a 
> hard disk? I know it's dangerous, but I would like to use a CD based 
> distribution, open up a terminal and type in a simple command to delete 
> all the partitions on a hard disk, or script the boot script to delete 
> them for me.
> 
> This has come about due to troubles with FC4 and RHEL4 whilst doing  
> reinstallation using kickstart, it seems that if partitions exist on the 
> disk the kickstart will fail.

I'd think that writing zeroes to the start of the disk would wipe the 
partition table fairly well, e.g.:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024 count=1024

That would zero out the first megabyte of the first hard disk, which 
should be ample I'd think.

Paul.




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