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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20120301/9fc02dbe/attachment.html>