how to recover my hard drive…put an iso image on it with dd

Question

I did the following:

dd if=some.iso of=/dev/sda

Or some such craziness. How should I recover from this? Gparted, etc..., didn't help out, deleting partition etc... Whenever I try to install a linux onto this disc it complains that its an iso9660 cd.

Answer 1

Zero out at least the first track of sectors, and you should be okay.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda count=63

Seagate and WD have CDs of utilities that can also do this. This will force the writing of a clean Master Boot Record, MBR, by the next installer you use. Some full-disk recovery programs work best by zeroing out the beginning of the disk before performing the installation.