>You are on the right path. It will take quite some time to copy a stream of zeros to the drive. You can speed things up by setting blocks to match the block size that your drive uses. I'd start by adding bs=1024 to the line. Read the man page for units and other bs= options. > >-Josh > How about this: $hdparm -d1 /dev/hda /dev/sdb then $dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sdb bs=2M The /dev/sdb was the new machine's drive which originally had WinXP on it. Can I just run dd over it without formatting it first? Olwe > >On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 9:09 PM, Olwe Bottorff <galanolwe at yahoo.com> wrote: > >I'm trying to low-level a 100 gb drive. It's in an external caddy and mounted on /dev/sdb. I ran this command: >> >> >>>sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb >> >> >> >>which is how I understand to low-level format a drive (wipe it clean). The trouble is, it's been running now for about 3 hours! Is that normal? The prompt is not returned and the little red lcd is flashing at a uniform rate. >> >> >>I'm doing this because I just wanted to get some practice in for what my real task is, which is to clone one machine's drive onto another new machine. My original Ubuntu 11.01 machine has a 160 gb drive, the target will be 250 gb. I'll put the target into the external caddy and run pretty much the same thing again: >> >> >>>sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb # sda = original ; sdb = new system in caddy >> >> >>Am I on the right track? I want exactly what's on my original U11.10 machine (Thinkpad t61) cloned to another t61. And will this take . . . 36 hours? >> >> >> >> >>Olwe >>GM,MN >>_______________________________________________ >>TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >>tclug-list at mn-linux.org >>http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >> >> > > >