Date: Sat, 2 May 2015 07:44:08 +0200 From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> To: "William A. Mahaffey III" <wam@hiwaay.net> Cc: "FreeBSD Questions !!!!" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: How to restore a USB drive converted to bootable Message-ID: <20150502074408.75b91059.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <5543FAA3.7050907@hiwaay.net> References: <5543FAA3.7050907@hiwaay.net>
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On Fri, 01 May 2015 17:20:10 -0453, William A. Mahaffey III wrote: > I am about to do some OS installs (NetBSD & OpenBSD, as it happens) on > boxen under construction. I would also like to use UBCD on a flash drive > to memcheck those boxen prior to installation. If I prep a USB thumb > drive as either a bootable UBCD drive or an over-the-WWW installer, I > wipe out the drive for its original use. Is there a way to restore the > drive back to its original functionality if I wanted to ? This is quite simple: Just erase the first few MBs (which is already overkill) of the USB drive. You can do this with on-board means (no need to install anything): # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 bs=1m count=1 Make _definitely_ sure that da0 is your USB drive before you enter the command. This will wipe the partition table and boot sector, so the drive appears as non-formatted. If you wish, you can then add a FAT partition, bsdlabel-style partitions, a UFS file system, or "raw" tar data, whatever you need. -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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