0
I'm trying to copy my hard drive. unxutils dd that used to work before, now doesn't.
So I'm trying the Cygwin version. It reads just fine, but can't open for writing:
$ dd if='\\.\PhysicalDrive0' count=0
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 4.4131e-05 s, 0.0 kB/s
$ dd if=/dev/null of='\\.\PhysicalDrive0'
dd: opening `\\\\.\\PhysicalDrive0': Invalid argument
basin
Posted 2014-03-01T12:59:56.103
Reputation: 394
1
You may need to use
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc
where sdc is whole drive that you want to be zeroed.
Check that you are sure that you are zeroing right drive.
sdc is the third whole drive,
sdc2 is the second partition on the third drive (contains boot sector if it is there).
Cygwin uses standard *nix terminology for local drives.
You may want to use pv (pipe viewer, it is available in Cygwin) to see the progress:
pv /dev/zero > /dev/sdc
pbies
Posted 2014-03-01T12:59:56.103
Reputation: 1 633
Windows has a /dev/zero and a /dev/sdc ? – Hennes – 2014-03-01T14:37:29.260
1Cygwin on Windows - yes, it has. – pbies – 2014-03-01T15:22:19.397
Cool. I really need to read Cygwin's documentation. – Hennes – 2014-03-01T15:27:06.683
Now if only they ported cfdisk – basin – 2014-03-02T08:14:52.353
2
This works:
dd if=/dev/null of='\\.\PhysicalDrive0' conv=notrunc,nocreat
basin
Posted 2014-03-01T12:59:56.103
Reputation: 394
You're reading from /dev/null, which should do nothing... – Bob – 2014-03-03T06:11:26.027
This opens a file for writing. Enough for a test – basin – 2014-03-03T10:36:42.780
Have you tried this native version of dd?
– user1686 – 2014-03-01T15:14:23.243Windows also writes zeros to a partition when doing a full format. This behavior has been implemented starting with Windows Vista.
– Daniel B – 2014-03-03T07:19:01.237