Hi, keep in mind that members of software RAID, lvm physical volumes and so on may house the data despite zeroed out first sector:
#dd if=/dev/md0 of=file count=1 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 512 bytes (512 B) copied, 0.00886503 s, 57.8 kB/s #dd if=/dev/zero of=zero count=1 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 512 bytes (512 B) copied, 6.3684e-05 s, 8.0 MB/s #diff file zero # md0 is a perfectly healthy device, btw... (LVM housing the root filesystem of the machine I used for that example...) cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md0 : active raid1 sdc4[1] sdb4[0] 64725760 blocks [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> PV /dev/md0 VG fatvg lvm2 [61.73 GiB / 17.73 GiB free] Making assumptions on the basis of the first sector (which you seem to make due to 'clean the disk with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda count=1') would actually destroy most of machines I call 'mine', so please forgive me the warning. Regards Michal On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 11:19, Andreas Schockenhoff <a...@gmx.li> wrote: > Hi, > > i am searching for a small shell script that detects, if the > hard disk is clean. > > I will use it for virtual machines. There I create always new clean > virtuell hard disks. I will stop the installation if the hard disk is > not clean. > > I will use it for easy automatic fai-cd testing. To be sure that they do > not destroy any data on real hard disks. > > In this case the user will use a hard disk with old data. He can clean > the hard disk with example dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda count=1. And > start again. > > The new GUID Partition or EFI ... hard disks seams to have also data in > the first sector of the hard disk? > > Better ideas? > > regards Andreas Schockenhoff > -- Michal Dwuznik