[Nottingham] 1GB of \0 (aka null)

Paul Sladen notlug at paul.sladen.org
Mon May 15 14:49:30 BST 2006


On Wed, 3 May 2006, Martin wrote:
> And what is best for overwriting unused areas of the hdd so that bzip2 
> can achieve maximum compression? (I'm guessing all ff's or all 00's will 
> do nicely.)

Zeros are better;  the utility used to do this on the (pre-dapper) Ubuntu
LiveCDs is:

  http://www.paul.sladen.org/ubuntu/e2fszero/e2fs-zero.py

which zeros out unused blocks on an Ext2 filesystem.

	-Paul
-- 
High on a Spanish mountain, surrounded by howling dogs.  Southampton, GB




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