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 > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20120301/e0daaa4b/attachment.html>