Jim Higson wrote:
On Wednesday 14 July 2004 00:02, William M. Quarles wrote:
Okay, so there is a /dev/zero. Shouldn't there be a /dev/one, too? Is
there any way that I can fill a file or device full of ones?
Btw, why do you want this?
Yeah, just run badblocks -w on the drive and be done with it... ;)
Good guess!
Well, that's an idea. And I'm trying it. It's yet to tell me anything bad, though, which all of the DOS-mode Windows programs have complained about bad sectors already (it does produce output upon each error, doesn't it?). I'm a physicist and I believe that their should be a way to coax bad blocks out of being bad. However, I'm not sure that badblocks is writing the patterns in a way that is conducive to the coaxing. Actually, I know one reason that it may not be conducive is if it fails to write and read with one number pattern on a block, it would note that block as being bad and go on to the next: however, my coaxing theory would require all of the patterns to be written to the disk, and in an order that causes all of the bits to be flipped frequently. There is also a federal procedure for the binary code that is to be written to a drive to make sure that it old data is wiped clean, I need to look that up and try it.
However, since you brought up badblocks, I found that it does allow any specified pattern to be written, which is good, because that may allow me to do what I want. It may take a while to specify an entire kilobyte in hex, though.
It seems that there should be some command to take a file full of zeros and negate it all so that they become ones: which hypothetically would work on a block device also.
Peace, William
