paul condon:
>
> I have two 3TB Seagate external HDs. They were purchased from
> different stores at slightly different times earlier this year, here
> in Colorado. I want them to have ext4 file systems on them,
> excepting if someone on this list can give a reason otherwise.
Ext4 is fine if you don't have any special needs. If you only use it for
comparably big files (movies, music, photos), you might want to use
mkfs.ext4 -T big. The -m option is probably interesting, too.
> I have googled and gotten a lot of hits, which indicate to me that
> this is a well known problem. Unfortunately, I have difficulty
> following the instructions, and all my efforts have not reached a
> successful conclusion. Now with further trys, it seems to me that
> stuff has been written onto the drives that needs to be wiped off
> because I get messages that from the disk utility in xfce4 that it
> won't overwrite a disk with data on it.
We cannot help if you don't tell us what you tried and how it failed.
But generally, overwriting the first megabyte is enough to make the disk
look unpartitioned/unused.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdg bs=1M count=1
> So I want to use dd to wipe a complete drive.
Should not be necessary and can take a long time. 3TB is about
2,861,023MiB. If your disk could write 100MiB/s, it would still need
almost eight hours to complete this task. Apparently, your disk is
slower than that.
> For this I have found the following:
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdg bs=1M
> In the above, I have already changed the HD device to sdg (from
> sda), but I wonder about bs=1M. Could the process go faster with a
> larger block size?
I doubt it, but you can try. You can add a parameter "count=<n>" like I
did above to write only <n> times bytes (bs).
> Is there some way to invoke an 'progress indicator' for dd?
Yes. See the man page:
| Sending a USR1 signal to a running `dd' process makes it print I/O
| statistics to standard error and then resume copying.
|
| $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null& pid=$!
| $ kill -USR1 $pid; sleep 1; kill $pid
|
| 18335302+0 records in 18335302+0 records out 9387674624
| bytes (9.4 GB) copied, 34.6279 seconds, 271 MB/s
> And, in general, is there a better way?
Just don't do that. :)
J.
--
In an ideal world I would cure poverty and go to the gym at least three
days a week.
[Agree] [Disagree]
<http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html>
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature