Fill a hard drive with ones - like zero-fill, but the opposite :)

tr '\000' '\377' < /dev/zero | dd bs=512 count=200000 status=noxfer | pipebench | sudo dd of=/dev/sdx

Note: Replace 200000 with drive bytes/512, and /dev/sdx with the destination drive/partition. ;) Note: You may need to install pipebench, this is easy with "sudo apt-get install pipebench" on Ubuntu. The reason I hunted around for the pieces to make up this command is that I wanted to specifically flip all of the bits on a new HDD, before running an Extended SMART Self-Test (actually, the second pass, as I've already done one while factory-zeroed) to ensure there are no physical faults waiting to compromise my valuable data. There were several sites that came up in a Google search which had a zero-fill command with progress indicator, and one or two with a fill-with-ones command, but none that I could find with these two things combined (I had to shuffle around the dd command(s) to get this to happen without wasting speed on an md5sum as well). For reference, these are the other useful-looking commands I found in my search: Zero-fill drive "/dev/sdx", with progress indicator and md5 verification (run sudo fdisk -l to get total disk bytes, then divide by 512 and enter the resulting value into this command for a full wipe) dd if=/dev/zero bs=512 count=<size/512> | pipebench | sudo tee /dev/sdx | md5sum And this command for creating a file filled with ones is my other main source (besides the above command and man pages, that is - I may be a Linux newbie but I do read!): tr '\000' '\377' < /dev/zero | dd of=allones bs=1024 count=2k Hope someone finds this useful! :) Cheers, - Gliktch

Sample Output

Example of dynamic operating output:
87 MB   14.84 MB/second (Wed Sep  1 01:16:35 2010)

Example of summary output on end of process:
200000+0 records in
200000+0 records out
Summary:                                                                       
Piped   97.65 MB in 00h00m10.04s:    9.72 MB/second
200000+0 records in
200000+0 records out
102400000 bytes (102 MB) copied, 10.9973 s, 9.3 MB/s

By: Gliktch

2010-08-31 15:38:27

dd sudo tr

1 Alternatives + Submit Alt

Fill a hard drive with ones - like zero-fill, but the opposite :)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

perl -e '$s="$s\xFF" while length($s)<512; print $s while 1' | dd of=/dev/sdX

stonefoz · 2012-08-20 05:33:28 5

What Others Think

You're welcome. :) http://pthree.org/2008/06/09/chalk-up-another-year/

atoponce · 744 weeks ago

seofox · 147 weeks and 6 days ago

seofox · 147 weeks ago

rahimhh21 · 118 weeks ago

Perfecthomepugs · 109 weeks and 1 day ago

pugpuppies95 · 71 weeks and 2 days ago

yeneba6574 · 26 weeks and 1 day ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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