[nycbug-talk] dd /dev/null before imaging disk

[George Georgalis]

Before imaging a disk, I've been in the habbit of

dd if=/dev/null >/usr/zeros ; rm /usr/zeros

etc, for each partition, and from a mini-root cdrom, whatever.
The idea is to make the media contain the most compressable bytes
possible. Then I dd the entire disk to bzip2 and save the output
to my image file.

I assume this works, I have come up with some rather small image
files.

So now I want to image an NTFS XP install, is there any good and
easy way to write out zeros before I image?

// George


-- 
George Georgalis, systems architect, administrator <IXOYE><