Unable to erase MBR

[Raoul_Duke]

Just got a nice new box :)

Just put my old HDD in........but...............

Sat on the MBR along with grub was some drive overlay software that mis-reported to get around older bios lock-ups.

It's screwing with my new box.....most distros are giving me probs because of this software.

fdisk /mbr just says

Unable to open /mbr

Any good tricks to wipe it??

[mdwatts]

Is the overlay software still required and if not, can you remove it?

Some of them have remove utilities which you can possibly search Google to find those utilities or bootup commands to access the overlay software.

[sarah31]

you could try zeroing it out:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<drive>

[Raoul_Duke]

alas, the official software is on a floppy and i have no working FDD :(

I'll try the dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<drive> now

[Raoul_Duke]

Originally posted by sarah31
you could try zeroing it out:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<drive>

eeek! took long enough but worked a treat.....thank you :)

[sarah31]

the bigger the drive the longer it takes :) but i am glad it helped. i had to use this once about a year ago when all seemed lost.

[The Whizzard]

Originally posted by Raoul_Duke
eeek! took long enough but worked a treat.....thank you :)
It coulda been quicker. You just needed to get rid of the MBR. If I'm not mistaken, the MBR utilizes the first 512 bytes of the HDD. So a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<drive> bs=512 count=1 will wipe only the MBR and take less than a second to perform.

[DMR]

Originally posted by The Whizzard
If I'm not mistaken, the MBR utilizes the first 512 bytes of the HDD.Right. Zapping the first 512 Bytes would have worked.

:)

[Raoul_Duke]

Arghh!! thanks for all the help guys but the drive starting giving me errors :(

Even IBM's drive utilities wouldn't fix it :(

Still, good excuse to go out and buy a nice new 80gb HDD :p