On 24/06/13 16:55, paul condon wrote:
I have two 3TB Seagate external HDs. They were purchased from different
stores at slightly different times earlier this year, here in Colorado.
I want them to have ext4 file systems on them, excepting if someone on
this list can give a reason otherwise. I have googled and gotten a lot
of hits, which indicate to me that this is a well known problem.
Unfortunately, I have difficulty following the instructions, and all my
efforts have not reached a successful conclusion. Now with further trys,
it seems to me that stuff has been written onto the drives that needs to
be wiped off because I get messages that from the disk utility in xfce4
that it won't overwrite a disk with data on it.
So I want to use dd to wipe a complete drive.
For this I have found the following:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdg bs=1M
In the above, I have already changed the HD device to sdg (from sda),
but I wonder about bs=1M. Could the process go faster with a larger
block size? What are the criteria for choosing a value for bs? And, how
long should a 3T wipe take to complete? The job has been running for
about 12 hours. Would it go faster with a different bs? Faster enough to
make the waste of 12hrs running worthwhile? Is there some way to invoke
an 'progress indicator' for dd? And, in general, is there a better way?
As people have already answered all your above questions, I'll just add
to the last one.
Install and use dcfldd. It uses the same syntax as dd, but with some
extra security and progress features.
If you add "sizeprobe=of" to the command list, it will use the size of
the destination drive to show a regular progress report of MB
transferred and %age complete.
The only issue I've found with it is that it sometimes doesn't report
100% complete if the reporting interval isn't an exact fraction of the
total size. It does still write the whole file though.
--
Dom
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