From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Oct 4 7:31: 2 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2C5F837B401 for ; Fri, 4 Oct 2002 07:31:01 -0700 (PDT) Received: from aker.amduat.net (aker.amduat.net [206.124.149.187]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 83BAA43E75 for ; Fri, 4 Oct 2002 07:31:00 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jbarrett@amduat.net) Received: from amduat.net (trilluser@osiris.amduat.net [10.0.0.69]) (authenticated bits=0) by aker.amduat.net (8.12.5/8.12.5) with ESMTP id g94EUxA6034639 for ; Fri, 4 Oct 2002 07:30:59 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jbarrett@amduat.net) Message-ID: <3D9DA621.2080201@amduat.net> Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2002 07:30:57 -0700 From: "Jacob S. Barrett" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.2a) Gecko/20020910 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Block Zeroing Tool Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Is there a tool for FreeBSD that zeros the unallocated blocks on a filesystem? The company I work for has an image on demand system for our lab machines. This system relies on ghost which only supports file by file imaging on certain file systems. I want to take disk images of certain FreeBSD installations. Ghost will only take sector by sector images of FreeBSD partitions. Since it is doing this it stores all the "junk" unused blocks as well. This makes for a very large image even with high compression. If I can zero out the unused blocks before taking the image with high compression the image size should be much smaller. So, is there utility to zero out those blocks? Does this make sense? Is there a better way to take images of FreeBSD machines? -Jake -- Jacob S. Barrett jbarrett@amduat.net www.amduat.net "I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it." To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message