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Accepted
Daniel
Asked: 2012-03-28 03:52:33 +0800 CST

How to delete the MBR (Master boot record) out of an image file?

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I have a QEMU image myserver.img that is about 20GiB. The file serves as a "virtual" hard disk for the server. Now the first 512 bytes contain the MBR, and I am trying to overwrite those bytes with zeroes. On a normal disks, this one would work:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

But when I try that on the image file, the file gets overwritten and is only 512 bytes in size (instead of 20GiB). Is there a way to change only the first 512 bytes, preferably with dd?

linux dd qemu

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Add conv=notrunc:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=YOUR_IMAGE_FILE bs=512 count=1 conv=notrunc
    • 6

  2. Try using dd with conv=notrunc 

    dd if=/dev/zero of=myserver.img bs=512 count=1 conv=notrunc

    From the dd man page

       notrunc
          do not truncate the output file

    e.g.

    ls -l myserver.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 iain users 1536 Mar 27 12:31 myserver.img

dd if=/dev/zero of=myserver.img bs=512 count=1 conv=notrunc

ls -l myserver.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 iain users 1536 Mar 27 12:32 myserver.img
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