difference between mount point and physical drive?

[Michael George]

On Friday, October 25, 2002, at 02:37  PM, Albrecht Dre=DF wrote:

> Am 25.10.02 19:45:05 schrieb(en) Stephen Lewis:
>> Sometimes it is faster than reading the
>> filesystem, but because it copies empty
>> blocks also it might be slower too. If your
>
> It's sometimes nice to burn complete partitions compressed on a=20
> cd/dvd. To avoid that you have random data on the unused space, you=20
> can use e.g.
>
> dd if=3D/dev/zero of=3Dzerofile bs=3D1M count=3D1

This will fill the disk with data (even if it is all 0's).  I am=20
guessing that one would want to make sure that nothing else is writing=20=

to the partition and you don't want to do this to your / partition=20
(which would be a bad idea anyhow)?

> (replace the "1M" with the free space on the disk), erase zerofile,=20
> unmount the partition, and say
>
> dd if=3D/dev/sda1 | gzip -9 > pratition.gz
>
> or even
>
> dd if=3D/dev/sda | gzip -9 > pratition.gz
>
> This is not fast, but nice if you want to make a "master copy" for=20
> installing several machines with identical disks. The second variant=20=

> includes even the partition map, but may actually need a dvd...

-Michael George