On 2009-03-31, Dave Angel <da...@ieee.org> wrote:
> I wrote a tiny DOS program called resize that simply did a
> seek out to a (user specified) point, and wrote zero bytes.
> One (documented) side effect of DOS was that writing zero
> bytes would truncate the file at that point. But it also
> worked to extend the file to that point without writing any
> actual data. The net effect was that it adjusted the FAT
> table, and none of the data. It was used frequently for file
> recovery, unformatting, etc. And it was very fast.
>
> Unfortunately, although the program still ran under NT (which includes
> Win 2000, XP, ...), the security system insists on zeroing all the
> intervening sectors, which takes much time, obviously.
Why would it even _allocate_ intevening sectors? That's pretty
brain-dead.
>> Is there a way to create a file to big withouth actually writing
>> anything in python (just give me the garbage that is already on the
>> disk)?
No. That would be a monstrous security hole.
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