On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 12:14:21PM -0700, Joe wrote: > I've having a problem understanding how to write data to a disk. > I want to wipe an old hard drive before getting rid of it. > I have attached the hard drive to my system via usb. > > Normally, this would work (in different OS's): > > # dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sd0 > > However, this command creates a file /dev/sd0 and fills it with random > data. I want to write this data to the disk instead. > > The same thing happens when I use /dev/rsd0. > > Any help would be appreciated.
do you actually have a 'sd0' in /dev? fdisk/disklabel may take 'sd0' as a reserved meta keyword shortcut for device, but 'dd' has no special handling like that, afair, so when you say 'of=/dev/sd0' you are really asking it to put data in that literal file. perhaps try the 'c' partition if you intend to write to the entire disk. -- jared [ openbsd 3.9-current GENERIC ( may 1 ) // i386 ]
