How do I do a complete format of my drive?

Posted by: Flawed

How do I do a complete format of my drive? - 09/04/2007 17:56

I'd like to start from scratch and do a complete rebuild complete with 2 100GB drives and a lot of audiobooks. I've followed Rob's instructions and they seem to work fine but one of the drives had music on it in the past. It seems to be causing me some issues. Can't get emplode to sync with no music on there and so forth. Basically, I'd like to write zeros to the whole drive and not just on the partition table. What is the command for doing that?

Is it: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

Thanks!
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: How do I do a complete format of my drive? - 09/04/2007 18:07

Yeah, that'll do it, assuming the drive you're interested in is hda. But you probably booted from hda and zeroing out your boot drive is probably a bad idea, so you might want to think about booting from a different drive and zeroing out hdc.
Posted by: mlord

Re: How do I do a complete format of my drive? - 09/04/2007 18:22

Quote:
I'd like to write zeros to the whole drive and not just on the partition table. What is the command for doing that?

Is it: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda


Yes, or even just

cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda.

No need to boot from elsewhere for this -- it will work just fine (on the empeg).

Cheers
Posted by: tfabris

Re: How do I do a complete format of my drive? - 09/04/2007 21:23

Quote:
but one of the drives had music on it in the past. It seems to be causing me some issues.


If you are having sync problems with 100gb drives, I doubt that prior music is the cause of your problem. Zeroing out the drive will erase past music, but I think you've got a larger problem stemming from the drives being "large drives" and not having been built properly.

I suggest going over to riocar.org, hitting Disk Upgrade Guide, and using the builder images linked from there. Go through that whole thing carefully, paying particular attention to any section that says SPECIAL NOTE FOR LARGE DRIVES or similar.

I recommend running Mark's bigdisk builder twice: Once with only the primary drive plugged in, and once with only the secondary drive plugged in (with its jumper removed). Each time, also do as the disk upgrade guide suggests, and install the bigdisk version of the player software onto each drive as well.

If you get errors during this process, then you might be having data errors with the disks, possibly caused by cable/IDE header troubles. Investigate that, too.