Using Gentoo to format.

[swerve]

Hi -
I recently picked up a gateway MX7525 and I am using gentoo to wipe the HD.
The command I used is this: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

My friends do it like this all the time and they are walking me through it however it has been doing this for around 16 hours now.
The HD is 100 gig and 4200 RPMs... I assume this is why it's being so slow?
My HD light is on so I figure it will be done when it decides to?
I'm very new at all this but I'd like to learn something,
Thanks,
Adam

[troymc]

Well the command you used is correct.

And it is a big, slow drive and lots of configuration settings could be slowing it down (ie. did you enable DMA?) - so I wouldn't worry yet. But if it does continue much longer you may be experiencing disk errors. The drive may have some bad areas or be failing generally.

When it gets done I'd definitely suggest checking its SMART info and running some tests on it.


troymc

[c0bblers]

Unless you want to totally blank the disk altogether (i.e. you're selling it on and want to make sure there's no data to be found on it) doing that's overkill since you're blanking out every single byte on the disk. That'll take an age. As above it's a good idea to check that DMA has been turned on when you boot since it can affect the performance of the disk quite dramatically. Fiddle around with hdparm to find out how it's configured.

[swerve]

thanks -
I have always did it this way but I've never owned a notebook so I thought I would put the question out there. I work all weekend so I won't get to play around w/ it at all for more than 1 hour at a time before tuesday. Hopefully it will be done tonight so I can start checking some things out.

If I were to stop this process would I be harming anything?

Thanks again!
Adam



Also if I wanted to replace the HD what could be some possible suggestions?

[seablade]

Well stopping it would probably just cause it to be unfinished, and most likely read like an unformatted drive.

If you wanted to replace it, since it is a notebook drive I would reccomend the Hitachi 7200 RPM, or a Seagate 7200 drives myself, but if you arent doing audio/video editing and the like you could probably get by easily with a 5400 from either Seagate or Hitachi as those are the two brands I reccomend.

Seablade

[Ernest_P_Worrel]

Theres always dban (dylan's book and nuke) if want to give another program a try, it comes on a live linux cd with alot of system crash/managment tools. http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page