How would i go about writing zero's to my hard drive, without an operating system installed, and without a floppy drive. I do have a cd rom drive, im trying to install windows server 2003 on it, but the partition is corrupt, and whenever i try to delete it, or do ANYTHING from windows setup, i just get gay errors, so basically im looking to write some zeros, and retry. If that doesnt work, then i know i got a hardware problem.

Writing some zero's? Is this a metaphore or are you actually trying to write some 0's... Once you define what exactly you mean I might be able to help ya :)

uhh lol I didn't think id have to explain it. Writing zeros == erasing all sectors/tables/partitions/everything from your hard drive.

Get a DOS boot diskette. Run fdisk.

If you'd rather write it directly, use a disk editor and zero out the partition table.

[quote]
How would i go about writing zero's to my hard drive, without an operating system installed, and WITHOUT a floppy drive.
[/quote]

what is a disk editor?

Go to www.download.com and type "disk editor". Here is the first hit from the results:

Acronis Disk Editor 6.0
http://download.com.com/3000-2094-10158234.html?tag=lst-0-1

From the developer: "Sometimes problems can arise with hard disk that cannot be solved without advanced disk editor. Such problems require immediate back up, copying, recovery of boot sectors and other important data areas of hard drive; search, extraction of information that was lost by accident, due to failure, or through the destruction from a computer virus. For these and other problems, our professional software will help you solve and repair problems with your hard disk.

"Acronis Disk Editor 6.0 is capable of working both in universal hexadecimal mode of data representation, and in special modes for editing Partition tables, FAT and NTFS bootsectors, and also FAT folders. Disk Editor features simple tools of hard disk sectors and partitions navigation, searching for lines, saving of necessary sectors to files and inserting data from files to sectors."

Hrm, I know i mentioned there is no operating system... oh i know what i forgot, this is a seperate computer! Silly me, any ideas now?

Because of the variety of "unique" questions that come outta the heads of the "unique" people that write on our forums, your statment of "writing some zeros" could have meant a lot of things. Thus being why I asked for clarification on what exactly you meant. I don't enjoy assuming things and answering questions based on that assumption only to find out the answers were wrong because the person meant something else.

I'm sure you see my point as for why I asked you to clarify what you meant :)

I would do what Grok suggested and try to get a boot disk but on CD or get an editor... it's gonna be tricky without a floppy drive so why not save yourself the aggrivation and just go buy an 8 dollar drive? Or swipe it from another system to use temporarily. www.bootdisks.com has all you need to get your system up and running, as far as the formating of the partition. Although I'm not sure I understand how you can't do all that FROM the win2k3 disk... I can only assume that the required files you could get from either of the sites suggested are on that disk (is it valid or no? I'm assuming its not...) As for the disk being corrupted do you mean when you try to format the disk, possibly the VOLUME of the drive has jargon for the name or is the disk actually damaged.

As I say in the programming classes I take merley for credit alone, I tell those that ask questions to FULLY explain their problem as much as they can without leaving anything out for assumptions.

Another idea would be to take the HD your trying to work on and hook it up to another computer as a slave drive and work on it that way. At least to get the disk working so that it's not corrupted.

I have a spare floppy in another computer of mine, i just wanted to know if there was a way to do it without it.

[quote author=MesiaH link=board=2;threadid=2785;start=0#msg21959 date=1064229972]
I have a spare floppy in another computer of mine, i just wanted to know if there was a way to do it without it.
[/quote]

It's like what, a 6minute proccess of taking it out of the other, putting it in that one and putting the disk in? I think you would have saved yourself a lot of time by just doing that.

Remove the broken hard drive from other computer. Open the working computer and attach IDE and power to the broken hard drive. Don't bother mounting it, just leave it dangling. Leave the case open too. Boot the working computer.

Make sure the BIOS sees the broken hdd. If BIOS cannot see it, throw away broken hard drive.

If BIOS sees it, boot that computer to a CDROM or Floppy that has fdisk or a dos-mode disk editor.

Enough hand holding. You should be able to figure out how to clear the partition table from there.

While your're at it, you might as well do a little bit of maintenance.

[quote author=Thing link=board=2;threadid=2368;start=#msg18564 date=1061158555]
Raven has a good point. Another thing you can do to help extend the life of your hard drive is some routine maintenance. Pop the cover off and you will find two oil points where the arms attach to the motor. A single drop of 3in1 oil will do the job. Don't put too much though or you may contaminate the platters. You will want to spray some WD-40 on the platters to keep the nice and shiny. It also keeps them from rusting in humid areas such as bathrooms, etc. Here is a photo of a typical hard drive.

[img]http://www.vpnsys.com/images/oilhere.jpg[/img]
[/quote]

About writing zeroes:

You rarely need to write zeroes to the entire drive, just clearing/rebuilding the partition table should be enough for what you're trying to do.

Writing zeroes is useful when there's sensitive data that you want to get rid of. (Note that you can still get some very expensive tools to recover lost information even after zeroes are written to the entire drive...)

If you really want to do it: Western Digital HDs come with a floppy labeled "EZ-Install". Boot from it, and one of the things you can do is write zeroes to a drive. (If your HD isn't WD, you'll get over it.)

it is a very very old Maxtor 8.4 gig, and i want to write zeros just to be safe, i have no important data on it, im starting fresh to host servers and things on it, and i know i can do all that from a floppy, and i have another old computer with the floppy, so i dont need to put it into my main computer, i was just asking if i could do it without one, just for future knowledge in rough situations...

This is one of those threads where the question is answered repeatedly, but the person asking doesn't seem to get it.

Is this a thread where we're gonna have to continue giving repeated or new answers until he stops asking? Btw, about the future rough situations, if you are capable or running a computer and having enough intelligence to ask questions on the forums, then you should be smart enough to take one of the... 5 or 6 ways Grok or I've posted to help you in those times. Or you could make it so that you get to a point with a future situation where you CAN use one of our suggestions. If not, I suggest bringing your system to a computer store or sending it back to the manufactuer for repair. Or in this case get a new HD sinse you can buy a new 80 or 120 gig WD drive from newegg for somwhere beteen 70 and 110 dollars.

[quote author=Grok link=board=2;threadid=2785;start=0#msg22006 date=1064290793]This is one of those threads where the question is answered repeatedly, but the person asking doesn't seem to get it.[/quote]but $t0rm hasn't answered yet! No thread is complete until $t0rm answers and everyone ignores him. :)

Kp is right. $torm needs to stop playing with the Chinese and reply to this thread.

I think the answer he is looking for is this:

If you boot from a hal91 image (a very small linux distro on a disk), you could use dd and /dev/zero to write zero's to a disc.

The syntax for this would be: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd[a-z]
where [a-z] is the letter of the given hard-drive.
it will be a waste of time, but go ahead and play with it :)

-- lp_ql

this post was complete some time ago, and i think some people mis-interpreted my ideals..

I had the floppy drive the whole time, i just wanted to KNOW if there was a way of going about it from a computer with no floppy, and no OS.

I have installed the floppy, and i am about to install windows server 2003, no linux crap for me, no offense.

Now i just need to find out what kind of boot disk to use..

CDROM!

My motherboard has 2-3 pins missing (broken off?) in the floppy male connector on the motherboard.

If I connect a floppy drive to the board, I can read floppies fine, but an attempted write operation causes the system to freeze.

Needless to say, I have no problem with this :)

Uhh

Burn a bootable cdrom with knoppix on it and tell it to clear the partition table?

If not, magnets may get the desired effect.

[quote author=St0rm.iD link=board=2;threadid=2785;start=15#msg22468 date=1064771374]
If not, magnets may get the desired effect.
[/quote]

That's a good point!