Joe Pfeiffer grabbed a keyboard and wrote:
> David Guntner <david@guntner.com> writes:
>
>> Hugo Vanwoerkom grabbed a keyboard and wrote:
>>> David Guntner wrote:
>>>> Hmmm..... I wonder if the MBR for the drive sill has a loader on it,
>>>> even though I removed all partitions and repartitioned it? Is there a
>>>> utility out there that can wipe the MBR of a drive without touching the
>>>> rest of the contents?
>>>
>>> There is http://bootinfoscript.sourceforge.net/ also.
>>
>> Ok, I got that, thanks. Ran it and it does look like there's a remnant
>> of the old 6.0 system that lived on that drive at one time.
>>
>> So, how to *wipe* the MBR for that drive without losing everything on
>> it? :-) Is there a way?
>>
>> 'Cause face it, if I get rid of the boot record on the drive, grub won't
>> see it anymore even without my disabling the probe script. :-)
>
> That is the cleanest way to do it!
>
> Looking around a bit, I found the following:
>
> https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=119702
>
>
> The command to do it was
>
> $sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=446 count=1
>
> Something the poster didn't emphasize strongly enough (IMHO) is that
> he's only wiping the first 446 bytes of the MBR -- this leaves the
> partition table alone.
Seems like a good idea. I tried it, but it doesn't look like it worked:
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=446 count=1
> 1+0 records in
> 1+0 records out
> 446 bytes (446 B) copied, 0.000867678 s, 514 kB/s
> # update-grub
> Generating grub.cfg ...
> Found background image: /usr/share/images/desktop-base/desktop-grub.png
> Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amd64
> Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-4-amd64
> Found memtest86+ image: /memtest86+.bin
> Found memtest86+ multiboot image: /memtest86+_multiboot.bin
> Found Debian GNU/Linux (6.0.7) on /dev/sdb1
> done
Grub still seems to think there's Linux on /dev/sdb1. That's
aggravating...... I guess I'll just try moving the stuff off of the one
and only partition on that drive to somewhere else temporarily, and then
delete the partition outright and recreate it. Maybe *THAT* will
finally do it!
--Dave
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