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Wiping out your entire hard drive
Authored by: akejay on Mar 21, '04 10:05:14AM
The following is dangerous - proceed cautiously! Backup and/or disconnect all important devices before doing this! How to clear your entire primary drive and get it ready for repartitioning: 1. Boot the Mac OS X CD (hold C) 2. Go into single-user mode (hold Option-S) 3. Run these commands:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk0 bs=1k count=1k
pdisk /dev/rdisk0 -initialize
reboot
4. Boot the Mac OS X CD (well, it happens by default now) 5. Use Disk Utility to partition the drive 6. Proceed with the installation as normal If you feel lucky, you can also edit the map (partition table) of /dev/rdisk0 interactively by just running "pdisk" and using the prompts. Have fun, - Jake

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