Need to overwrite a hard drive

[Stan_Lite]

I tired to install Ubuntu on one of my PCs the other day but it wouldn't recognise the drive as suitable for installation. I did a bit of searching and it turns out that Ubuntu isn't keen on installing on drives that have previously been in a RAID array.

The drive in question used to be striped with another in RAID0 which has been dismantled.

Whilst searching for a solution, I came across a solution that said that overwriting the drive with 0s and 1s would wipe the old RAID info from the drive and allow installation of Ubuntu.

What I would like are suggestions on how best to go about this. Any help would be gratefully received.

[Mark]

Does Ubuntu detect the drive at all? If so, then since you're already running the live CD, just open up a terminal and enter:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd# bs=4096

Where # is the device assigned to your hard disk (a, b, c, etc.). Make absolutely sure you get this right as you don't get a second chance.

PS - this will take a while - probably a few hours.

[Stan_Lite]

Cheers Mark, I'll give that a try (tomorrow). Ubuntu sees the drive in the LiveCD environment and will allow partitioning in GParted but won't recognise it during installation :huh: