I'm just asking this out of curiosity, what is the Windows equivalent of rm -rf / ? For those who don't know, the linux drives are all folders inside the root drive (/). So, /home, /cache, /boot, etc. are all folders that could be stored on any physical disk. There is no C:\ drive or D:\ drive. Coming back to my question, its possible to wipe off the whole disk (in fact all disks on the system!) by running the command rm -rf / in linux (though only root can do that, no other user). Similarly, what will happen if I ran rmdir /s C:\* or something like that? Is there any single DOS command to wipe off the entire C:\ drive?
C: is the system partition, is not possibile delete all folder format d: is the fast way for delete all from the drive, otherwise rd /s /q d:\
wipe - secure delete ? diskpart > sel disk 0 > clean bring the whole disk(not vol, all the vols in this disk will be cleaned) back to default factory state
Since rm -rf / is a common troll among new GNU/Linux users, The "Delete System32" meme would be the most similar, although it does not delete every file on the hard disk. Too answer your question, not even the Administrator account can delete those system files, to the best of my knowledge. You'd have to do something like takeown /f
Hello @ rms returns - To quote Ingio Montoya, "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means". In this case, it depends on what you mean by using the word "wipe". Using the "rm" command is in no way meant to securely erase the files on a disk or disk partition, all it does is remove the directory structure - the raw data still remains on the disk. Any decent data recovery software should be able to retrieve these files. A much better approach would be to use the "shred" command. Example: "shred -vzn /dev/sda1" would overwrite all data on partition sda1 with zeroes. Substituting "sda" for "sda1" would overwrite /dev/sda -the entire disk. Another alternative would be the "dd" command. Example: "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=1024" would also overwrite all data on partition sda1 with zeroes. Also using the "dd" command: "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1 bs=1024" would overwrite all data on partition sda1 with random data. This is very useful if you plan to encrypt /dev/sda1 using cryptsetup/luksFormat afterwards, since the random data tends to "mask" the encrypted data. NOTE: Do not use any of the above commands on a sold state drive. In that case, use the manufacturer's software (if available) to securely erase the SSD, or use Partition Magic to perform an ATA Secure Erase by choosing the "Internal" option - do not use "External"! This erases the SSD using the SSD's internal firmware.