Hi. I'm not sure if this is the right section, but I ran parted magic live to securely erase a sata ssd drive. I also went to erase the mbr and it came up with something odd. I've done this many times on different drives and normally only the two drives come up. The sata drive and the usb stick that parted magic is running from.

On this occasion it shows 15 more all starting nbd. What on earth is it? And how do I get rid of them?

I tried to upload an image but am having problems doing that - so when I open the list to select a device to be erased, what is listed is

sda (my 232gb ssd)
sdb (16gb flash drive)
nbd0: 0B (Model unknown SN: undetected)
nbd1: 0B (Model unknown SN: undetected)
nbd2: 0B (Model unknown SN: undetected)
nbd3: 0B (Model unknown SN: undetected)
nbd4: 0B (Model unknown SN: undetected)
nbd5: 0B (Model unknown SN: undetected)
nbd6: 0B (Model unknown SN: undetected)
nbd7: 0B (Model unknown SN: undetected)
nbd8:

and so on down to nbd15

These shouldn't be there!

I have erased the drive twice, reformatted and erased again and they are still there. If I go to write zeros to the entire drive (not a good idea I know with an ssd) or go to erase the mbr - it gives me a list of devices to choose from and that includes the 15 nbd's. So I can't seem to erase them, whatever they are. Parted magic thinks they are devices.

The briefest of googlings would've showed you that nbd is a network block device. Apparently you have libnbd or nbdkit or something like it installed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_block_device

Or said another way, why do you care ?.

If you've paid for support, ask them.

Hi thanks. Yes I did google it and find they are network block devices and couldn't understand why it would find them on my machine, which has nothing installed - I had just wiped the drive. I wiped the drive due to a previous dodgy install so thought maybe the dodgy install had done something on the machine. I was just worried because it said nbd's share things betweeen a drive and a server so thought they were permanent. It was mainly because I've used parted magic a number of times before and never seen this before. I've now been told elsewhere that the nbd's are not on my machine as such, but have been loaded with parted magic (which was run live). Thank you for your help.

As an update, apparently I can ignore them but they are not in the newest 2024 version (I was using the 2022 version so have now got the 2024 version). I still don't understand the purpose of them appearing as devices but at least I know it's nothing to worry about (but prefer the version where they're not there!).