what if you just dd the first 1GB of the disk and the last GB of the disk (the last because of RAID signatures of some controllers that write to the end of the disk) Look at this article and modify accordingly https://zedt.eu/tech/linux/using-dd-to-repeatedly-erase-a-specific-range-of-sectors-on-the-hard-disk/ Also, use wipefs -a (Gordon Messmer answered faster than me) On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 3:18 PM david <david at daku.org> wrote: > Folks > > I've encountered situations where I want to reuse a hard-drive. I do > not want to preserve anything on the drive, and I'm not concerned > about 'securely erasing' old content. I just want to be able to > define it as an Physical Volume (in a logical volume set), or make it > a ZFS disk, or sometimes make it a simple EXT3, ExFAT or NTFS > disk. However, old 'signatures' get in the way and Linux sometimes > refuses to let me proceed. I know that a fool-proof solution is to > use the "dd if=/dev/zero bs=32768 oflag=direct" on the disk, but when > we're talking USB-connected hard drives of 8 TB, that's an operation > that can take days. > > The disk in question might even have been corrupted. This would make > using 'zpool destroy' to clear out a ZFS disk, or > > I've tried erasing the first megabyte of the disk, but there are ZFS > or LVM structures that get in the way. So, does anyone have an > efficient way to erase structures from a disk such that it can be reused? > > Something like > -erase first N blocks (block defined as 4096) > - Erase <number> blocks starting at block <number> > - erase last <number> blocks > > At least such an algorithm would be quicker than erasing 8 TB of data. > > David > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > -- --------------------- Erick Perez Quadrian Enterprises S.A. - Panama, Republica de Panama Skype chat: eaperezh WhatsApp IM: +507-6675-5083 ---------------------