Saturday, May 18, 10:17 pm

How to Erase MBR In Linux

Written by Mel Kham on June 30, 2009. Posted in Frequently Asked Questions

The Master Boot Record (MBR) is the information in the first sector of any hard disk or diskette that identifies how and where an operating system is located so that it can be boot (loaded) into the computer’s main storage or random access memory. The Master Boot Record is also sometimes called the “partition sector” or the “master partition table” because it includes a table that locates

each partition that the hard disk has been formatted into. In addition to this table, the MBR also includes a program that reads the boot sector record of the partition containing the operating system to be booted into RAM. In turn, that record contains a program that loads the rest of the operating system into RAM.

Question:

how to erase MBR in Linux ?

Answer :

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1

bs = the first 512 bytes of the harddrive to remove the bootloader

For questions please refer to our Q/A forum at : http://ask.unixmen.com

Master boot recod

MBR

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remove MBR from Hard disk

7 Comment(s)

Mel Kham

Founder of Unixmen, Living in Amsterdam. Am working in my free time to help people to understand the Opensource and to explain them in easy way how to make the fist steps to the the light. Working day and night with my Co-founder Zinovsky to keep this website live even with less resources.

shortbaldman

If you use a figure of 512 bytes to be zeroed out, you will also zero out the disk’s partition table. The bs count needs to be less than 512 so that the partition table is retained. (I don’t have the actual figure with me at the moment. You should be able to Google for it.)
- pirat9
  
  Tp wipe out the partition table also, change 446 to 512.
http://www.facebook.com/rbrockway Robert Brockway

erasing 512 bytes like this will destroy the partition table. set bs=446 to erase the boot loader and leave the partition table intact.
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Piomar

Shouldn’t the output be like this: of=/dev/hda not of=/dev/hda1 (the entire drive not the first partition)? Or it doesn’t matter?
- creatron
  
  Please correct the above, the correct answer is indeed as suggested above
  dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda count=1 bs=446
Andrew Ampers Taylor

I have tried whole scripts trying to get my computer back, finally, I tried this in Live Ubuntu 13.05 and it workedd, after a small tweak.

Just need to add sudo and a space before dd

Thanks, you have evidently heard of the K.I.S.S. principle!

Ampers

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