[CentOS] Question about dd (fill a hard disks' unused space with blanks)

In my previous experience, zeroing the disk will result in smaller files for
G4U but it will take awhile depending on many factors including the size of
the disk, performance, etc..
Also, I recommend giving Clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org/) a try.  It
offers more options than G4U and is more efficient in my experience.

Matt

--
Mathew S. McCarrell
Clarkson University '10

mccarrms at gmail.com
mccarrms at clarkson.edu


On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 12:34 PM, Rainer Duffner <rainer at ultra-secure.de>wrote:

>
> Am 07.06.2009 um 18:22 schrieb Niki Kovacs:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm currently experimenting with G4U (Ghost for Unix), a small cloning
> > application sending disk images to an FTP server.
> >
> > The application reads the whole disk bit by bit, compresses it and
> > then
> > stores it remotely. Due to this approach, it's more or less
> > filesystem-independent. The drawback is that it sometimes results in
> > huge image files.
> >
> > Now I'm currently following a hint which suggests to fill the disks'
> > unused space with zero bits. Here's the command for that:
> >
> > # dd if=/dev/zero of=/0bits bs=20M
> > # rm /0bits
>
>
>
> This will create a file that fills up the root-partition.
> If you have multiple partitions beyond that, it's not of much use.
> Ideally, the zero'ing of the disk should take place before the OS is
> installed, via a boot-cd and using dd with the disk-device itself
>
> All this made some sense when disks didn't come in sizes of 250GB
> upwards...
> If you get 20MB/s from your dd(1), it would take 1000 seconds to fill
> 20 GB...
>
>
>
>
>
> Rainer
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20090607/58f28918/attachment-0001.html>