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Date:      Fri, 04 Oct 2002 07:30:57 -0700
From:      "Jacob S. Barrett" <jbarrett@amduat.net>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Block Zeroing Tool
Message-ID:  <3D9DA621.2080201@amduat.net>

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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."


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