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Questions tagged [zero-write]

6 questions
53
votes
7 answers

Is an HDD overwritten with zeroes faster?

I had a PC with two OSs installed, which hard drive I erased using Disks from UbuntuUSB. I chose quick erase. As I understand, it deleted partition table, but all files' ones and zeroes are still on the HDD. I then created new partition table, and…
Danyl Filatov
  • 631
10
votes
2 answers

Zeroing the content of a hard drive without destroying the filesystem

I've copied a lot of photos on an external hard drive from an old computer that was used by an old person and was probably infected by malwares. I've put the photos on another hard drive. Now my external hard drive is completely empty but I'm…
Nicryc
  • 765
4
votes
1 answer

Is there a faster way to verify that a drive has been fully zeroed?

In the coming months, I'm going to need to zero out a lot of disks. After wiping each drive, I need a quick way of making sure that the drive has been completely filled with zeroes. I could open each one in a hex editor, but all this does is allow…
Hashim Aziz
  • 13,835
3
votes
2 answers

How to determine in Windows whether a disk contains any data or is completely blank (zeros)?

I would like to ask how to find out in Windows whether or not a disk contains any data ? In other words: I need to verify if any non-zero bytes exist on the disk. Can this be done with any tool shipped with Windows (10 in my case) or any other tool…
summerrain
  • 491
1
vote
2 answers

Why does dd give me an error at the end of zero-writing a disk?

I'm running Cygwin on Windows 7. I was using the following dd command to securely erase a 1TB mechanical disk: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sde bs=4M status=progress About 2 and a half hours into the wipe, around the time I was expecting it to complete…
Hashim Aziz
  • 13,835
0
votes
1 answer

only zeroing disk part that are not already set to zero

I usually use # pv -terab /dev/zero > /dev/sdx to zero a disk (ie: /dev/sdx). Basically, it just writes zero everywhere without caring of the previous values. However, I'm wondering if it wouldn't be faster, especially on USB flash drive, to read…
Grenouille
  • 11