Native backup/restore partition options

[scott-DPNOqEs/LNQ at public.gmane.org (Scott Ehrlich)]

On Sat, 30 Jun 2007, Tom Metro wrote:

> Scott Ehrlich wrote:
>> Tom Metro wrote:
>>> dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/partition/zero
>> 
>> I presume I'd do this from the installed, live OS?
>
> A CD bootable OS should work just fine for this, as long as it can mount (and 
> has write access to) the partition where you want to write the zeros.

I question this only because, if done from a CD bootable OS, I would 
think it would overwrite all the data on the mounted partition with all 
zeros, which is not what I want.  And if done from the live running OS, it 
may cause instability of the filesystem when complete by likely writing 
over existing files.

Or am I missing something?

I only want to zero out the unused space to help dd go faster and produce 
smaller files when I image the partition.

Scott

>
> -Tom
>
> -- 
> Tom Metro
> Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
> "Enterprise solutions through open source."
> Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/
>

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