difference between mount point and physical drive?

[Albrecht Dreß]

Am 25.10.02 22:02:22 schrieb(en) Geert Janssens:
> Also note that Albrecht's explanation stated:
> - create a zerofile occupying the partition's free space
> - remove the zerofile

     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ of course, this step is important... You can also 
say in one command

dd if=/dev/zero of=zerofile bs=1M ; rm -f zerofile

which will write 1MByte blocks of zeros until the file system is full and 
erase the file immediately. So the only chance to get a "file system full" 
is in the very short period between the dd failing because of a full file 
system and the rm command freeing the space. However, if you want to make a 
master copy of a partition, you should ensure that nobody else works with 
it. It is also important that you use this method for creating a backup ONLY 
on unmounted or read-only partitions (unmount or remount ro *after* zeroing 
out the free space, of course ;-)), as you would get file system errors 
after restore.

Cheers, Albrecht.


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