On Aug 17 2009, Stefan Monnier wrote: > You'll be bette off with "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda", BTW since you > can then check the progress via "kill -USR1",
Well, I really like ddrescue from the gddrescue package for this very reason. The command to use would be "ddrescue /dev/urandom /dev/hda". No need to mess with sending processes signals, the complexity of changing terminals etc. Not only you see the progress, but you can use it as a sort of benchmark tool to deal with hard-drives. I do this when, say, I get a new kernel version (together with other standard versions), especially when I am dealing with platforms/drivers that are not that mainstream. BTW, what about using /dev/zero before (or instead) /dev/urandom? Of course, if the goal is privacy, then a long time will be needed with many runs of patterns being written to disk (that is, if your disk doesn't die before finishing the runs). :-) It seems that dcfldd would be useful here, but I'm not familiar with it yet. Regards, Rogério Brito. -- Rogério Brito : rbr...@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8 http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-powerpc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org