On Thu, 1 Mar 2012, Olwe Bottorff 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
First, the bs= option Josh mentioned is great. Use that.
Second, if you do a ps and find the PID for the dd process and send it a
kill -USR1, it'll print out the current status.
Third, and my favourite, install pv (you can apt-get it under ubuntu) and
pipe the dd commands through it, like this:
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1K | pv | dd of=/dev/sdb
This will give you a progress indicator while dd is running.
Note that if you're sudoing one of the dd commands, you may need to sudo
the other, too.
-Yaron
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