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

Mon Jun 8 13:52:05 UTC 2009
Hakan Koseoglu <hakan at koseoglu.org>

Kevin,
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 11:05 PM, Kevin Krieser<k_krieser at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> On Jun 7, 2009, at 2:59 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> In my case, I was hoping it would avoid the bad sector since the bad
> sectors were in free space.  So the hope was that it would skip it.
> Bad disks are a difficult case, and not a reason to avoid a tool
> unless it claims to be able to handle it.
One option is not using a cloning tool but a backup & rescue utility.
http://www.mondorescue.org/ might work, it doesn't backup the whole
disk but tries to recreate the original data. I use it for cloning
CentOS/RHEL servers and creating bare-bones rescue disks. Since it
only reads and writes back files, it won't go through the free bad
blocks.

-- 
Hakan (m1fcj) - http://www.hititgunesi.org