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Dante
Asked: 2016-07-30 02:49:01 +0800 CST

Is it safe to do dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<destination partition>

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I want to wipe one of my partitions say sda2 (I don't care about data security in this case). Does dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda2 damage sda1 and sda3 or even partition table?

partitioning

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The command dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda2 (needs to run as root or with sudo) does only overwrite the complete /dev/sda2 partition with zero-bytes, nothing else.

    It will neither affect other partitions nor the partition table.

    Only if you have a SSD, you should not do this, because the memory cells of an SSD wear out by overwriting them and because a software block address does not correspond to a fixed hardware memory cell. That means you can not overwrite a specific memory cell anyway.

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