put each block of a HDD to zero

[x-ray]

hy folks,
the topic == my question, cause long time ago, i can hardly remember there was a command i read in a linux magazine, in the magazine there was a Live-CD of Knoppix - i think it was version 3.4 - and the magazine said that with just this single one command you could put or set each block of a HDD to zero, so i don'T have this magazine anymore but would strongly need this command now.
I would be happy if it were possible for someone here to help me, but pleaze do not give me the impolite advise to use google, cause i already did but without success...
greetz && thx m8s

[x-ray]

ok, no need for posting replies i think! i figured it out:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

thats the command disc-dump: means that everything that comes within the if(=inputfile) will be copied to /dev/hda (=the common 1st HDD), in this case the if /dev/zero is a virtual file which can permanently supply 0-Bytes as long as the end of /dev/hda is reached.
if there are some bad sectors on the HDD you can use # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda conv=noerror to delete those too otherwise the disc-dump would stop immediately when arriving a bad sector.

so, i hope thats the right way to do such a thing, if i am wrong pleaze correct me... thx anyway

p.s.: if u believe i'm not native english speaker - u r goddamn RIGHT!

[kirol]

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

I suspect this may be slow with the default block size of 512 bytes; try using something bigger instead, e.g:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=4096k

[x-ray]

thanx m8, it did work, fact is that there were 2 PC, i name them "the old" PC and "the new" one - ok?
ok, the old PC has a very small sized HDD with 14GB, so i did it with a blocksize of 1024k, worked fine and didn't last long, guess half an hour.
So, the new one doesn't use the IDE technology, but S-ATA (DVD) - that means that Knoppix is not able to boot. hm, tried to make a USB-Stick bootable with this tutorial: http://www.plop.at/de/ploplinux.html#windows - i also changed the BIOS HDD-bootlist and put the USB:memory on 1st place, then the same in boot sequence but it didn't work, maybe cause the stick is too old, no idea Y? so now I go on by tryin make a bootable floppy with the knoppix version 3.8 - i hope that will work cause otherwise i will use the 6.2 DOS to format the HDD with format -U, or get the DVD Drive connected with IDE instead of SATA...

[x-ray]

I did it with Kubuntu 7.10, since version 7.04 they implemented S-ATA Driver, it's another open source Live-distribtion, but does exact the thing i want! NICE! i would like to advise everybody with S-ATA havin the same prob to use this distribution. eheh kk cu guys