Sterilizing free space

Sy Ali sy1234-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Thu Dec 29 14:46:11 UTC 2005


Thanks for the help.  This command generated a nice big zerofile from
which I can do standard file sterilization.

cat /dev/zero > /mnt/<mountpoint>/zerofile

Doing this to two partitions of the same size gave me a curiosity. 
Both partitions had cat report running out of space and yet df
--block-size=1 reported:

* Partition 1: 9844854784 with 9843179520 used
* Partition 2: 9844854784 with 9843236864 used

In both cases I made the zerofile while the partition was mounted as ext3.

I'm going to check out bcwipe now.  I had a note on it but ignored it
because I didn't know it was freely available to try.


I took some notes over here:
http://jrandomhacker.info/Data_sterilization
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