!!!! don't do this - for example only !!!!!

To break the partition table, we want to use the technique from the first slide, but now we'll write zeros to the first 512 bytes of the drive. Before we do this, we want to backup the partition table (and the master boot record) on an external drive with the following command dd if=/dev/hda of=/media/usbdisk/partition_table.bak bs=512 count=1 Now we wipe out the partition table with the following command dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 Now when we reboot, we should see that we are back in our original situation, but this time it's slightly worse. We no longer have any partitions on our disk (or so it appears). We verify this by booting with a live CD and running the command

fdisk -l /dev/hda

this shows us that there are no partitions defined on the drive. In reality, the filesystems and all of their data is still intact, the drive just has no information about where they reside.