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

[Jonathan Stewart]

George Georgalis wrote:
> 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?

See section 5.10 http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

There are a couple of different ways mentioned

Jonathan