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

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
>
> _______________________________________________
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> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
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>
>
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