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

[George Georgalis]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 05:34:11PM -0400, Jonathan Stewart wrote:
>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

I used "cipher /W:C:" and that worked great! (I just ran it a
second time a little bit to fix the over-run of the first run)

In the past g4u was not the right solution for me... but now it is
the perfect tool, and worked like a champ.

// George


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