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

Sun Jun 7 17:08:09 UTC 2009
Mathew S. McCarrell <mccarrms at gmail.com>

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
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