Fwd: /dev/null > /dev/sdb1 !

["Rafael Fontenelle" <rffontenelle@gmail.com>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rafael Fontenelle <rffontenelle@gmail.com>
Date: 25/04/2008 01:19
Subject: Re: /dev/null > /dev/sdb1 !
To: paragasu <paragasu@gmail.com>

2008/4/24, paragasu <paragasu@gmail.com>:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

to fix it. i did try that command but it seems doesn't help much either.

Could this command have the same result as 'cat /dcev/null > /dev/sdb' ?

actually, i read some post from

http://howto.wikia.com/wiki/Howto_wipe_a_hard_drive_clean_in_Linux


and some post from linuxforums about this

Strange. I set a virtual machine with an extra harddisk and I just ran 'cat /dev/null > /dev/hdd' as root with /dev/hdd3 umounted in the first attempt and then mounted in the second, but nothing happened with my partition or the whole virtual disk. See the output below:

rffdebian01:/# cat /dev/null > /dev/hdd
rffdebian01:/# cd /mnt/hdd3/
rffdebian01:/mnt/hdd3# ls
file
rffdebian01:/mnt/hdd3#

It seems that /dev/null really returned _nothing_. Very different from 'cat /dev/zero > /dev/hdd'. This one really formated the virtual harddisk, cleaning incl. the partition table (I had to remake the partitions with cfdisk). Also displayed a message after completing the harddisk with zeros.

rffdebian01:/# umount /dev/hdd3 && cat /dev/zero > /dev/hdd
cat: write error: No space left on device
rffdebian01:/# 

Note: when I ran this with /dev/hdd3 mounted, I got a lot of error messages and the system didn't want to umount not either reboot. Pretty messy.

So, I think that the command 'cat /dev/null > /dev/hdd' did nothing to your system. Maybe something else?

Cheers,

Rafael