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Date:      Sun, 22 Jul 2012 18:14:02 +0200
From:      Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de>
To:        Bruce Cran <bruce@cran.org.uk>
Cc:        Wojciech Puchar <wojtek@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, Robert Bonomi <bonomi@mail.r-bonomi.com>
Subject:   Re: fsck on FAT32 filesystem?
Message-ID:  <20120722181402.9fec82f0.freebsd@edvax.de>
In-Reply-To: <500C1788.8000505@cran.org.uk>
References:  <201207221038.q6MAc8kW022215@mail.r-bonomi.com> <500C0B21.3020001@cran.org.uk> <alpine.BSF.2.00.1207221701330.2621@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> <500C1788.8000505@cran.org.uk>

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On Sun, 22 Jul 2012 16:08:56 +0100, Bruce Cran wrote:
> On 22/07/2012 16:01, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> >> 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M' works under Cygwin - or you can 
> >> just write a load of zeros to \\.\PhysicalDrive0 .
> >
> > who prevents you to bood live CD or pendrive with FreeBSD (or 
> > openbsd,netbsd,linux,solaris,whatever usable)?
> 
> Nobody - I didn't say users couldn't boot from a FreeBSD/etc live CD, 
> but zeroing the disk in Cygwin is an alternative.

Installing Cygwin on a "Windows" PC is nothing an average user
could achieve easily. The _idea_ of booting something else is
also no typical approach. That's why professional companies
offer a paid service so the user does not have to invest his
valuable time in educating himself about alternatives what
he cannot do _natively_ with his "Windows". It's a simple
market decision which seems to work (or they wouldn't care
to offer it).

Furthermore, in your example using Cygnwin's dd _on_ the disk
Cygnwin is currently running from, and the "Windows" it runs
on too, doesn't seem like a very good idea. I assume it will
result in a bluescreen soon and a _partially_ erased disk.

By the way, I remember I had a DD.EXE program on my old DOS
system. I'm not sure if such a tool could operate on devices
(instead of filesystem-based representations as "drive letters"),
but it actually _was_ a DOS-based "copy & convert" utility
for the PC. :-)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...



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