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

[Martin]

Paul Sladen wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for the note.

I'm using ReiserFS so I just used:

dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfileofzeros

to fill up the spare space on that partition and then deleted the file.
That zeros the spare space with just a small overhead for the inodes used.

Or is there some utility...

BTW: It certainly works well with gzip!

Which leads onto another question...

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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