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I have been using Ubuntu 12.10 as a dual-boot on my primary computer, lately everything has become a bit unstable, Steam games crash often, everything has been slowing down a lot. Anyway, my computer came with 64bit Windows, and I had 32bit Ubuntu installed. My plan was to wait for Portal 2 to come out, wipe the hard-disk, and install 64bit ubuntu, but because everything got a little unstable like I said before I decided to wipe it a little earlier, I will explain what I did in steps:

  1. Copy all my data I want to keep to an external harddrive
  2. Download 64bit Ubuntu 13.04 and make a bootable usb-stick
  3. Select the option: format harddrive and install ubuntu in the setup.

After that was all done I couldn't wait to restart my computer to feel the speed of a fresh install, but unfortunately; my pc came up with an error saying there are no active partitions and running the HP diagnostics gave me a BIOHD-3 error.

Now, after doing some research I think it's my MBR that is pointing to a partition that doesn't exist anymore. I found something on the forums telling me to open grub in the terminal, so that it says grub>. The first command I would have to type was find /boot/grub/stage1 but that gave me a file not found error. I also tried the HP recoverydisks to fix the MBR and then reinstall linux but for some reason those just keep loading files and rebooting.

So my question is: is there a way to reformat the drive and restore it as if I just bought it and took it out of the box, with an empty MBR and no partitions?

Thanks in advance :)

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Yes there is:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/harddisk

Where harddisk is the drive for example: sda or sdb.

You also can zero only certain partitions.

If you e.g. have 500 GiB harddisk - I would do that overnight since it could take quite some time.

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  • Thanks, I will try this and let you know if it worked :) Jun 16, 2013 at 17:42
  • For example old machine with 32-Bit-Processor and 60 Gibi harddisk takes 3 to 4 hours for completing the dd-command like above. Jun 16, 2013 at 18:00
  • My harddrive is 2TB :/ luckily i have a 64 bit processor Jun 16, 2013 at 18:03
  • With 4 cores in Processor - it can last 25 hours ?! Jun 17, 2013 at 16:02
  • It took less then 1 night :) unfortunately reformatting the harddrive wasn't the solution, after that I decided to try to install Ubuntu 12.04 64bit and upgrade from there, the upgrade from 12.10 to 13.04 was a little glitchy but it works now. Anyway, thanks for telling me how I could zero out my drive, even tough it wasen't the solution, I was able to cross one possible cause of the list :) Jun 17, 2013 at 19:20

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