Wiping out externel HD holding NTFS

[womp]

Hello,

when I try to wipe out the contents of a harddrive holding Dell fs and utilities, with a rm -rf command I am told that the files are read-only. So I change the permissions, as root, and try again, only to receive the same message.

I then tried fdisk but that also did not wipe out this harddrive.
What is the correct command to wipe out the contents of a NTFS drive on an linux platform?
I am trying to do this on a opensuse 10.3 system

Thanks

 

[pentode]

NTFS compatibility in Linux has been a long struggle because the file format is proprietary.

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

Newest version of ntfs-3g has full read/write capability, but not sure you can change file permissions. NTFS was read-only in Linux for quite a while.

You might check on what version of ntfs-3g you have, if any.

If you can boot into Windows, you might be able to erase or change permissions.

 

[thedaver]

I think using fdisk to change the partition type to 82/83 "linux" would allow (require) you reformat the partition. You're going to want to do that anyways to get it away from NTFS for future use.

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[xwb]

Are you trying to wipe out a disk that used to have NTFS and put Linux on it?

If you have an NT disk stick it into the drive and go through the NT installation as far as formatting the partition. Format it as FAT or FAT32 then abort the NT installation, reboot and start the Linux install.

Alternatively, get a copy of FreeDOS. The fdisk from freedos will wipe NT partitions.

 

[stefanwagner]

I guess it might be mounted read-only - maybe in fstab.
So do a

mount

and read the output for that drive / partition carfully.

Post it here.

If that's the problem, remounting it might be sufficient:

mount -o remount rw /dev/hdf3

(I did not test it - maybe you need to really umount it, and mount by hand, now giving rw-option).

I don't know how new opensuse 10.3 - recent kernels are told to be pretty stable on ntfs - yes, on writing to ntfs.
Reading is done since years.

More details on the fdisk-problem would be useful.
An errormessage?
You should umount before fdisk.



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http://home.arcor.de/hirnstrom/bewerbung

 

[womp]

Folks,
I have a drive that is hooked up to one of those enclosures that house several harddrives and is used, in my case, for storage of information. The drives I have in this enclosure has information from other systems they used to be hooked to.
The one I am having problems with was once part of a dell system. I am trying to wipe out this harddrive totally to put other information on it. Not an operating system just documents, spread sheets etc.
I work with linux exclusively and just want to wipe out the data that is currently there. So, how do I wipe out a harddrive contents with linux??

 

[zeland]

So, how do I wipe out a harddrive contents with linux??

dd if=/dev/zero of=[some_device] bs=512 count=1

Its usually enough just to wipe out the first 512 bytes of a HDD for fdisk to recognize it as a blank drive. If however you want to zero out the whole disk, just leave out the bs=512 & count=1 parameters.

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