On 02/08/06, Brad Campbell <address@hidden> wrote:
> ZIGLIO, Frediano, VF-IT wrote:
> > Hi,
> > well, this is not a definitive patch but it works. The aim is to be
> > able to wipe the disk without allocating entire space. When you wipe a
> > disk the program fill disk with zero bytes so disk image increase to
> > allocate all space. This just patch detect null byte writes and do not
> > write all zero byte clusters.
> >
>
> I've been giving this some pretty heavy testing over the last week and can
say I've not noticed any
> negative performance impact or any other adverse side effects, not to mention
the speedup when doing
> re-packing (which I do fairly regularly on both ext3 and ntfs guest
filesystems).
>
> While I'm here does anyone know of a simple program, either dos or linux
based for wiping unused
> space on fat filesystems? The only ones I've found so far have been windows
based.
I don't know if you mean just zeroing unused parts or reordering the
data and stuff like defragmentation. If you mean the former, there's a
universal method:
dd if=/dev/zero of=xxx; rm xxx
where xxx is a path to a new file on the filesystem, which must be
mounted. It will creata a zero filled file there, which will fill all
availiable space, and remove the file afterwards. I used this when I
needed to send filesystem images through internet so that they
compressed well.
If you add dd=<a-big-number-here> it might take less time to write the file.