I formatted a 160GB drive using:
dd if=/dev/zeros of=/dev/sda bs=512
I expect the entire drive is filled with zeros, but how do I check it?
I thought I could just cat /dev/sda and see all zeros, however, after I did that, the terminal appeared to freeze.
It is /dev/zero and not /dev/zeros so your command should be:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512
And not:
dd if=/dev/zeros of=/dev/sda bs=512
There are many ways to verify the drive contains only zeros but opening the drive as a file and viewing it is not the most efficient method at all.
A simple method wold be to use cmp which will compare two files byte by byte and report the first difference. Basically, you would compare /dev/zero as a file ( all zeros ) to your drive as another file like so:
cmp /dev/zero /dev/sda
If you get something like this:
cmp: EOF on....
Then files are identical up to the end of the shorter file ( your drive in this case ) and all there are are zeros.
A difference would be reported by cmp with something like this:
... differ: byte 1, line 1
