[Lvlug] FC4 partitioning?

[Caleb Shay]

Darryl Gibson wrote:

> <snip>
> Ok, I'll give it a try soon. Would you mind going into some detail as
> to what that does? I could probably decipher it after spending an hour
> or two RTFMing, but I suspect you could explain it in 30 seconds?

dd takes data from 'if' (in-file) and writes it to 'of' (out-file) in bs
(block-size) chunks, repeating forever or until 'count' is reached or
'of' fills up

so:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=512 count=4 of=/dev/hda

would read 512 byte blocks from /dev/zero (which just spits out nulls)
and write them into /dev/hda (the first ide drive) 4 times, for a total
of 2048 bytes, effectively zeroing out your partition table, mbr, and a
little bit afterwards just to be sure :)

This guarantees that your partition table and mbr are entirely clean
with no remnants of previous operating systems/boot loaders hanging around.

Caleb

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