<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt"><div style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; ">I'm trying to low-level a 100 gb drive. It's in an external caddy and mounted on /dev/sdb. I ran this command:</div><div style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; "><br></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">>sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb</font><br></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">which is how I understand to low-level format a drive (wipe it clean). The trouble is, it's been running now for about 3 hours! Is that normal? The prompt is not returned and the little red lcd is flashing at a uniform rate.</font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">I'm doing this
because I just wanted to get some practice in for what my real task is, which is to clone one machine's drive onto another new machine. My original Ubuntu 11.01 machine has a 160 gb drive, the target will be 250 gb. I'll put the target into the external caddy and run pretty much the same thing again:</font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">>sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb # sda = original ; sdb = new system in caddy</font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Am I on the right track? I want exactly what's on my original U11.10 machine (Thinkpad t61) cloned to another t61. And will this take . . . 36 hours?</font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica,
sans-serif">Olwe</font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">GM,MN</font></div></div></body></html>