Re: Question about dd (fill a hard disks' unused space with blanks)

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On Jun 7, 2009, at 12:34 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:

> Niki Kovacs wrote:
>> 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
>>
>> Now I gave that a shot, but after half an hour or so, I got a bit
>> impatient. Now the computer does not respond any more. Does that mean
>> he's just way too busy with dd? Or is there some mistake in the  
>> command?
>> As I see it, it will just be chugging on and on, no? Shouldn't  
>> there be
>> a 'count=x' option somewhere?
>
> I'll second the recommendation for clonezilla.  It knows enough about
> most filesystems (including windows ntfs) to only store the used  
> blocks
> and it can use network storage over nfs, smb, or sshfs if you use the
> bootable CD clonezilla-live version.   If you do a lot of cloning, you
> can also use the network-booting drbl version on a server that will  
> PXE
> boot a client into clonezilla with the image storage directory already
> NFS-mounted.  There is an rpm for Centos to install this.


The problem I had with clonezilla I had when I tried it once was I was  
attempting to clone a hard drive (windows) that had some bad sectors.   
Clonezilla didn't handle that well at all.  Either in duplicating the  
drive from one drive to another, or when I tried to back it up to a  
file on another USB drive failed verify.  Luckily, I had done a recent  
windows backup, so I went through the recovery DVD route on the new  
drive, removed programs I had previously removed from the factory  
install, then restored over itself.  I spent a lot of effort trying to  
avoid that.
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