JC, great videos always. 9:25 --- you elegantly underscore and _emphasize_ what *dd* truly is and can do. 7:38 --- very helpful for empty log files. 10:58 --- very helpful for ISO9660 naming. 13:24 --- very helpful for udev unplug/plug. With much appreciation.
"Now I am become dd, destroyer of disks..." ....really tried to make that work better, but the quote is as far as I'm going on 1 (one) cup of coffee damnit.
Joe, I'd like to take issue with your description of the data from /dev/random as "garbage". Random data is very useful for some purposes. For example, if you used dd to overwrite a Windows disk with bytes from /dev/random, then you would in fact be REPLACING garbage with good random data.
Well, random data is essentially "garbage", as in it's effectively incoherent to many utilities that demand a particular data format and structure. Would you be able to sort out a pile of paper scattered all over the place with nothing but illegible scribbles versus a cabinet with neatly-filed papers that are typewritten? The same happens if you write random data over the entire disk, since it will overwrite the partition tables, the file tables, and everything else. However, I will agree that it's not completely garbage if you're using it for something specific, like disk encryption. Although for overwriting Windows with random data, now THAT would be useful. (I would love to do that to help get some people I know off of Windows 10) ;P
Still, and knowing what "random" is... That was a great line. "...dev/random... which just spits out garbage..." Just nestled in the middle of a nicely technical (without being overtly 'techno-drivellish') instruction and tutelage... just like (oh nobody will notice this)... lolz... I cracked up. :o)
Absolutely fantastic! I'm new to all of this but I'm loving the control and level of understanding I'm achieving. Thank you for your clean and precise instruction!
Really appreciate this tutorial! I've seen this command a lot over the years and just haven't really understood it. It's actually pretty straightforward when understanding it! This is super helpful and I feel like I could probably use it without looking stuff up now! Subbed.
If you clone a drive, then want to use the old drive again in the same machine, make sure to reset the UUIDs on partitions on the old drive (or nuke the partitions) as they will otherwise be the same as the originals. While it will sort of work, unexpected things can happen and data may end up in the wrong place if it gets confused.
Restoring partitions is not the problem. The problem is having a system with two partitions with the same UUID. Some tasks use the UUID to identify the volume and can connect inconsistently, updating one or the other at different times.
i fucking love this command so much. its saved me when i was living in my van and only had a flash drive, and i just copied a whole OS bit by bit just now doing a harddrive swap, and i don't know how i can live without it :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
Joe, You mentioned /dev/zero is a source of zeroes, however I created a file; dd if=/dev/zero of=dd.txt bs=1b count=1 Then I nano dd. txt The contents was not zeroes. They were NULL characters. Am I missing something? I'm no longer scared of dd after watching your video. Only thing I wish you would have mentioned is how to use dd to backup and restore using compression. Good day Joe and thanks for another superb video.
:) Awesome. The NULL is exactly 0! Or rather a text editor reads 0's and a character containing only zeros is set to NULL. NULL is basically the state of zero. In text stored as data we use UTF or some kind of system to treat 0 and 1's (bits) linkt together to form a representation of the characters. So without checking Google I think the character "a" = 45. Or in binary (bits) 000101101. And like "0" = 170 or something... Point is that 00000000 = NULL. It is used for some stuff but really it is no 0 or O or anything but NULL. And it is made up of ZEROS! So you text editor did it's job and read the data and all it found was 0's. And it followed the programming reading the data as if it was intended to be characters. But since everything is 0's and it is told that is NULL it say that the file contains NULLNULLNULLNULL... 0 in text or maths is not the same as the data state of 0. 0 in computers is not 0 or zero. We just call it that. In reality a computer 0 is just a physical state somewhere on a data storage media. And we called it 0. And in the 1960 or 1970 NULL was set to be 000... Since if there is nothing written in storage it is going to be all zeros and so NULL means that there is nothing there! No value! It dose not exist! Missing! Ha! Fun computer nerd stuff!
Just liked and subbed. very good information. I did down loaded the software to automatically clone but my knowledge base of linux made it basically a nightmare. this is the exact thing i was looking for, the command strings to do various tasks the old school way so i learn it. thank you.
Dear Mr Joe, Thank you for your videos I learn something every time. I am copying my boot drive to an .iso file on another drive using DD rite now. Is there a gui software on mint that I can use to look inside of an .iso file? Never mind I figured it out.
you may find way more useful tool - ddrescue. this tool is for data recovery, but i often use is as a replacement for dd, to see a progress. It has slight different arguments but its quite simple too... if you need to test hard disk for errors - use whdd, clone of dos - mhdd for linux.
Joe, isn't advisable to execute the sync command after dd'ing an ISO and before unplugging the USB flash drive to eliminate the chance of an incomplete write? My understanding is that there is always a small chance that the buffer might not have been completely written to the storage device even though the dd command executed to it's completion.
You were talking about how long it can take to use dd to transfer data from one hard disk to another. The first time I used dd was when a friend's MacBook was having problems. He had asked me to help him (this was when pleasantly found out that OS X is a *nix os). At one point, my friend's father suggested that he buy a hard drive and copy the old one to the new one. I went online and searched for a good way to do this in Linux and discovered dd. However, the example I found used bs=1... I don't remember the size of the disk I was copying over (this was 6-7 years ago), but I started in the evening, went to sleep to a symphony of clicking hard drives, woke up to the same, and eventually friend just gave up on copying... What I'm wondering right now is what is the "default" block size when none is specified. Also, I remember reading several years ago that bs=4098 was optimum for using dd with hard drives. Is that still the case? There seems to have been some recent changes to dd, like the addition of status=progress...
Sounds to me like something went wrong and dd got hung up. As far as proper block size is concerned, it all depends on who you ask. since it tranfers the data in order it really should not matter on a spinning drive at all. each clsuter will rebuild itself. Ext4 does not use a fixed block size when formatting but NTFS does. 4096 may be more appropriate for SSD that usually have a nativ block size of 4096 and the order of the data written does matter but then again I don't know for sure. :)
Thanks for this video it really helped. Just have a few less question to get answers to and one would be can I use gpart even though I am using headless Ubuntu 18.04 ? So no GUI
Judging from the »i« and the »l«, it’s not Droid Sans Mono or Andale Mono. My guess is DejaVu Sans Mono (based on the Bitstream Vera fonts) or Menlo (an Apple font created by Jim Lyles, also based on Bitstream Vera). Edited to add: the dot in the »0« (zero) gives it away: Joe is using DejaVu Sans Mono here. Cheers!
dd is great at pre-warming virtual disks in cloud environments that thin provision. You can even nohup them to capture stdout then send dd a SIGUSR1 signal to see where that command is at. You can also extend partitioned filesystems using fdisk In sector mode for the headless people running Linux. Gparted hah.
Shell Casing dd versions that come with new coreutils releases support the *status=progress* flag. If you don't have the new ones, you can pass a USR1 signal to dd every so often to check up on its progress with *kill -USR1 PID* where PID is the process ID of dd. (or if you want it to do it automatically, there's "kill -USR1 `pidof dd`") If you want actual progress percentages and ETA, you'd need the size of the source and pipe the data to pv, though it's slower in comparison.
Whenever I use the DD command in Lubuntu 17.04 x86_64 to load an ISO onto a flash drive it says that the ISO isn't bootable. When I use Rufus 2.11 in Windows 10 the image works. Has this happened to anyone here before? I have used to same command verbatim that is shown at about the 13:00 mark.
great vid, but can you also show how to use DD to make windows hard disk replacements or better yet floppy images of a windows floppy disk, and how to restore that image onto a new disk, or how about a IBM disk, that products like winimage cannot handle , can dd create floppy images of just about any type? i been trying to archive all my old floppies and winimage just is not cutting thru all of them.. i am assuming you would do something like dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/home/flopimag/ibmdisk1.ima and if it was a dos/windows disk would it be dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/home/flopimag/doom1.ima (this ima should be able to be read by winimage to restore then?)
Hmm maybe that's what i should try then.. to make all my archive images of my floppies of 1.2mb and 1.44 mb as well as my 360K disks so would i be correct in the statement of making the floppy image file? sudo dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy.ima status=progress then if i ever needed to put that image back onto a floppy it would be sudo dd if=floppy.ima of=/dev/fd0 status=progress
Joe Collins :) I see. I started getting into Vim itself after falling in love with VimFX, a firefox addon. I do start to like Vim itself now. Maybe try out the vimtutor. Who knows, you may change your mind *cough cough* KDE *cough cough*
Andrei Ionescu I learned about vi and vim (don't think I really need that many features that neovim offers) out of curiosity a while ago (still can't get used to Emacs and derivatives) and it proved to be useful when school instructors tell you to SSH into the school server and do assignments in vi. lol
Same. After learning about plugins and being able to use Vim as a hex editor, I don't think I would want to use anything else (at least as often as I do with Vim) now. lol As far as coding and writing a lot, I agree with you there. I write code quite frequently for fun (mainly Python 2/3) and as well as for school. (the assignments for which I mentioned earlier were for C++ and Java programming courses - the course outline didn't specify that I had to use Visual Studio, and did offer instructions for Dev-C++, which I do know uses MinGW/MSYS. That makes things easier since as long as I'm not writing platform-specific code for assignments, the code can be easily compiled on Linux and Windows)
I don't think it would work that way. Assuming you could feed it from multiple files, there would be no way to undo it. If you want to do this with plain text, though, you can use the cat command... :)
@@ponyfucker3427 An ISO image contains a whole drive... It needs structure to make sense if you want to open it again. All dd does is move data into a file or other device. What's you'd get is a file you can't read. Making an iso from various files would involve more steps.
@@ponyfucker3427 Dear neighbor, I tested two simple text files serving as two 'if=' arguments for the *dd* command. *dd* ignored the first of the two 'if=' arguments. For giggles, I tested two 'bs=' arguments, and similarly the first of the two 'bs=' arguments was ignored by *dd*. The syntactical pattern for *dd* apparently is to ignore all but the last (right-most) of its arguments. With kindest regards. Yours sincerely. edit: preliminary conclusion might be that *dd* cannot be directed to stitch together multiple files into an ISO. Albeit I am nowhere near being an expert on this. Kindest regards and best of luck.
Yeah, I did that. I was trying to put fedora on my 16gb usb stick. I didn't know this at the time, but my machine had a 16gb ssd for ssd caching. They've changed the name for 'ssd caching' now, I can't remember what it is. But I always wonder why my machine loaded stuff so quickly. Anyway, it turns out you when wreck the ssd that's pair with the conventional harddrive for sdd caching, you wreck windows. No great loss, though I, but then I gave my girlfriend the computer and had to fix the problem. I never did, really, the ssd's just sitting there
Would not recommend the first example on a flash boot drive in Mint 19.. You might just run out of space! It's not pretty.. "dd" is very powerful as are most Unix/Linux operators - It is those "what if" modifiers we need to be very afraid of! Train-wrecks are made like this!
THE DIFFICULTY WITH THE DD COMMAND is that when you copy a hard drive it wants to use the exact same size drive! you cannot copy a 100 to a 50 which seems like it makes sense provided you dont think about it! but what happens if the 100 is only using 25 and you want to in all "honesty!" to just copy the 25 to the 50! could you just use the count command! could you find out how much the drive is using and copy that much!
No it doesn't work that way. Data is not stored on black devices that neatly either. It tends to be spread across the available space so the only thing dd can do is copy all of it. There are more complex tools like CloneZilla that will do what you're talking about. :)
*I used to be a heavy DOS batch file user who spent many years fighting off the graphical GUI.* Yeah, I remember when Assembly programming was all the rage, in some circles. Now, I am a confirmed high level Linux DE GUI kind of guy. Use the terminal at your own risk, installing rogue programs, in Linux, like Chrome. Once I did manage to destroy one HD fooling around in Windows. Those days are over for me, even though I can now buy decent used computer hardware and HDs dirt cheap. It is simply NOT worth the headache / nightmare. I basically bought my current desktop computer at what is called a Goodwill Warehouse Computer Store, for $5 USA, precisely because Microsoft Stopped supporting WindowsXP. It is a multimedia Dell duo core Intel Desktop, which is the fastest computer that I have ever own. Hard Disks are sold separately. I bought a 500 GB SATA for it, dirt cheap. I am definitely a good enough kind of guy. I switched over to Goodwill used equipment when computer fairs stopped coming to town. Rest assured that no homeless person ever buys computer equipment from Goodwill.
You might as well understand that GUI might avoid some (or even most) of the pitfalls of typos in the dreaded terminal, but you do lose a lot of functionality... AND you don't actually avoid ALL those pitfalls either. Any software or coding lingo' or other utility that is sufficiently advanced for technical progress is also inherently dangerous... At the end of the day, when someone finally invents something that is truly idiot-proof, only and idiot will actually want to use it. :o)
JC, great videos always.
9:25 --- you elegantly underscore and _emphasize_ what *dd* truly is and can do. 7:38 --- very helpful for empty log files. 10:58 --- very helpful for ISO9660 naming. 13:24 --- very helpful for udev unplug/plug. With much appreciation.
"Now I am become dd, destroyer of disks..." ....really tried to make that work better, but the quote is as far as I'm going on 1 (one) cup of coffee damnit.
Joe, I'd like to take issue with your description of the data from /dev/random as "garbage". Random data is very useful for some purposes. For example, if you used dd to overwrite a Windows disk with bytes from /dev/random, then you would in fact be REPLACING garbage with good random data.
Well, random data is essentially "garbage", as in it's effectively incoherent to many utilities that demand a particular data format and structure. Would you be able to sort out a pile of paper scattered all over the place with nothing but illegible scribbles versus a cabinet with neatly-filed papers that are typewritten? The same happens if you write random data over the entire disk, since it will overwrite the partition tables, the file tables, and everything else.
However, I will agree that it's not completely garbage if you're using it for something specific, like disk encryption. Although for overwriting Windows with random data, now THAT would be useful. (I would love to do that to help get some people I know off of Windows 10) ;P
Still, and knowing what "random" is... That was a great line. "...dev/random... which just spits out garbage..." Just nestled in the middle of a nicely technical (without being overtly 'techno-drivellish') instruction and tutelage... just like (oh nobody will notice this)... lolz... I cracked up. :o)
Absolutely fantastic! I'm new to all of this but I'm loving the control and level of understanding I'm achieving. Thank you for your clean and precise instruction!
Really appreciate this tutorial! I've seen this command a lot over the years and just haven't really understood it. It's actually pretty straightforward when understanding it! This is super helpful and I feel like I could probably use it without looking stuff up now! Subbed.
If you clone a drive, then want to use the old drive again in the same machine, make sure to reset the UUIDs on partitions on the old drive (or nuke the partitions) as they will otherwise be the same as the originals. While it will sort of work, unexpected things can happen and data may end up in the wrong place if it gets confused.
Restoring partitions is not the problem. The problem is having a system with two partitions with the same UUID. Some tasks use the UUID to identify the volume and can connect inconsistently, updating one or the other at different times.
i fucking love this command so much. its saved me when i was living in my van and only had a flash drive, and i just copied a whole OS bit by bit just now doing a harddrive swap, and i don't know how i can live without it :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
Joe,
You mentioned /dev/zero is a source of zeroes, however I created a file;
dd if=/dev/zero of=dd.txt bs=1b count=1
Then I
nano dd. txt
The contents was not zeroes. They were NULL characters.
Am I missing something?
I'm no longer scared of dd after watching your video. Only thing I wish you would have mentioned is how to use dd to backup and restore using compression.
Good day Joe and thanks for another superb video.
:) Awesome. The NULL is exactly 0! Or rather a text editor reads 0's and a character containing only zeros is set to NULL. NULL is basically the state of zero.
In text stored as data we use UTF or some kind of system to treat 0 and 1's (bits) linkt together to form a representation of the characters. So without checking Google I think the character "a" = 45.
Or in binary (bits) 000101101. And like "0" = 170 or something... Point is that 00000000 = NULL. It is used for some stuff but really it is no 0 or O or anything but NULL. And it is made up of ZEROS! So you text editor did it's job and read the data and all it found was 0's. And it followed the programming reading the data as if it was intended to be characters. But since everything is 0's and it is told that is NULL it say that the file contains NULLNULLNULLNULL... 0 in text or maths is not the same as the data state of 0. 0 in computers is not 0 or zero. We just call it that. In reality a computer 0 is just a physical state somewhere on a data storage media. And we called it 0.
And in the 1960 or 1970 NULL was set to be 000... Since if there is nothing written in storage it is going to be all zeros and so NULL means that there is nothing there! No value! It dose not exist! Missing!
Ha! Fun computer nerd stuff!
Just liked and subbed. very good information. I did down loaded the software to automatically clone but my knowledge base of linux made it basically a nightmare. this is the exact thing i was looking for, the command strings to do various tasks the old school way so i learn it. thank you.
Using the option status=progress is useful to use with dd to know that it is working.
Dear Mr Joe, Thank you for your videos I learn something every time. I am copying my boot drive to an .iso file on another drive using DD rite now. Is there a gui software on mint that I can use to look inside of an .iso file?
Never mind I figured it out.
Disks. Glad you figured it out. :)
Thanks Joe, another great tutorial! So I used dd for the first time
The DD command is a life saver
Thank you, Joe,
Thank your. Your tutorials are excellent..
you may find way more useful tool - ddrescue.
this tool is for data recovery, but i often use is as a replacement for dd, to see a progress. It has slight different arguments but its quite simple too...
if you need to test hard disk for errors - use whdd, clone of dos - mhdd for linux.
Great video with deep illustration.
Joe, isn't advisable to execute the sync command after dd'ing an ISO and before unplugging the USB flash drive to eliminate the chance of an incomplete write? My understanding is that there is always a small chance that the buffer might not have been completely written to the storage device even though the dd command executed to it's completion.
You were talking about how long it can take to use dd to transfer data from one hard disk to another. The first time I used dd was when a friend's MacBook was having problems. He had asked me to help him (this was when pleasantly found out that OS X is a *nix os). At one point, my friend's father suggested that he buy a hard drive and copy the old one to the new one. I went online and searched for a good way to do this in Linux and discovered dd. However, the example I found used bs=1... I don't remember the size of the disk I was copying over (this was 6-7 years ago), but I started in the evening, went to sleep to a symphony of clicking hard drives, woke up to the same, and eventually friend just gave up on copying...
What I'm wondering right now is what is the "default" block size when none is specified. Also, I remember reading several years ago that bs=4098 was optimum for using dd with hard drives. Is that still the case? There seems to have been some recent changes to dd, like the addition of status=progress...
Sounds to me like something went wrong and dd got hung up. As far as proper block size is concerned, it all depends on who you ask. since it tranfers the data in order it really should not matter on a spinning drive at all. each clsuter will rebuild itself. Ext4 does not use a fixed block size when formatting but NTFS does. 4096 may be more appropriate for SSD that usually have a nativ block size of 4096 and the order of the data written does matter but then again I don't know for sure. :)
Thanks!
Wikipedia mentions that default block size is 512 bytes. The smallest the data chunk the more reads and consequently more time to complete the task.
Thanks for this video it really helped. Just have a few less question to get answers to and one would be can I use gpart even though I am using headless Ubuntu 18.04 ? So no GUI
Really useful command and a very clear video -- thank you!
Nice video! What font are you using in this video if I may ask?
Several. Mostly monospace in the terminal... :)
Judging from the »i« and the »l«, it’s not Droid Sans Mono or Andale Mono.
My guess is DejaVu Sans Mono (based on the Bitstream Vera fonts) or Menlo (an Apple font created by Jim Lyles, also based on Bitstream Vera).
Edited to add: the dot in the »0« (zero) gives it away: Joe is using DejaVu Sans Mono here. Cheers!
I use dd to copy the disks, I have laying around, to ISOs and store/use them on my computer.
dd is great at pre-warming virtual disks in cloud environments that thin provision. You can even nohup them to capture stdout then send dd a SIGUSR1 signal to see where that command is at. You can also extend partitioned filesystems using fdisk In sector mode for the headless people running Linux. Gparted hah.
Hey Joe ! Nice Video, I did learn something today. Big Thanks to you for that ! :)
Very informative Joe!
Thanks for that, loads of useful information
Thanks. This answered the question I had.
It would be better if the dd thingy would show a percentage done or remaining counter. Just one of the drawbacks of the Linux terminal I suppose.
Shell Casing dd versions that come with new coreutils releases support the *status=progress* flag. If you don't have the new ones, you can pass a USR1 signal to dd every so often to check up on its progress with *kill -USR1 PID* where PID is the process ID of dd. (or if you want it to do it automatically, there's "kill -USR1 `pidof dd`")
If you want actual progress percentages and ETA, you'd need the size of the source and pipe the data to pv, though it's slower in comparison.
Was it pv or dialog? I've seen examples utilizing either.
Whenever I use the DD command in Lubuntu 17.04 x86_64 to load an ISO onto a flash drive it says that the ISO isn't bootable. When I use Rufus 2.11 in Windows 10 the image works. Has this happened to anyone here before? I have used to same command verbatim that is shown at about the 13:00 mark.
Disk destroyer sounds like smaller version of Star Destroyer :)
TOTAL OS TODAY There's also different variants of dd that can be used for disk recovery. (ddrescue)
So.....back up the drive FIRST.
GOOD ADVICE.
Can I use dd to do that?
Yes.
great vid, but can you also show how to use DD to make windows hard disk replacements or better yet floppy images of a windows floppy disk, and how to restore that image onto a new disk, or how about a IBM disk, that products like winimage cannot handle , can dd create floppy images of just about any type? i been trying to archive all my old floppies and winimage just is not cutting thru all of them.. i am assuming you would do something like dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/home/flopimag/ibmdisk1.ima
and if it was a dos/windows disk would it be dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/home/flopimag/doom1.ima (this ima should be able to be read by winimage to restore then?)
dd doesn't care what's on the disk... It will copy anything. :)
Hmm maybe that's what i should try then.. to make all my archive images of my floppies of 1.2mb and 1.44 mb as well as my 360K disks
so would i be correct in the statement of making the floppy image file? sudo dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy.ima status=progress
then if i ever needed to put that image back onto a floppy it would be
sudo dd if=floppy.ima of=/dev/fd0 status=progress
mperu99, I believe those commands are correct in both cases...
Thanks...Great refresher 👍
thanks for this great video..
dd: writing to '/dev/sdc': Input/output error
whats up with that? is my usb dead?
Joe" North Korea" Collins with your tip of the week. (J/K)
So Joe, ever gonna try out Vim?
No. I hate Vim. I can use it if I absolutely have to but that's it.
Joe Collins :) I see. I started getting into Vim itself after falling in love with VimFX, a firefox addon. I do start to like Vim itself now.
Maybe try out the vimtutor. Who knows, you may change your mind *cough cough* KDE *cough cough*
Andrei Ionescu I learned about vi and vim (don't think I really need that many features that neovim offers) out of curiosity a while ago (still can't get used to Emacs and derivatives) and it proved to be useful when school instructors tell you to SSH into the school server and do assignments in vi. lol
Same. After learning about plugins and being able to use Vim as a hex editor, I don't think I would want to use anything else (at least as often as I do with Vim) now. lol
As far as coding and writing a lot, I agree with you there. I write code quite frequently for fun (mainly Python 2/3) and as well as for school. (the assignments for which I mentioned earlier were for C++ and Java programming courses - the course outline didn't specify that I had to use Visual Studio, and did offer instructions for Dev-C++, which I do know uses MinGW/MSYS. That makes things easier since as long as I'm not writing platform-specific code for assignments, the code can be easily compiled on Linux and Windows)
Can I use dd to take data of several files following one another and then put them into one combined image file?
I don't think it would work that way. Assuming you could feed it from multiple files, there would be no way to undo it. If you want to do this with plain text, though, you can use the cat command... :)
@@EzeeLinux I mean, you can do that with mkisofs. Is an image made with dd and ISO something else or basically same thing?
I wondered I could shave off unallocated space by making image from all partitions instead of whole drive.
@@ponyfucker3427 An ISO image contains a whole drive... It needs structure to make sense if you want to open it again. All dd does is move data into a file or other device. What's you'd get is a file you can't read. Making an iso from various files would involve more steps.
@@ponyfucker3427 Dear neighbor, I tested two simple text files serving as two 'if=' arguments for the *dd* command. *dd* ignored the first of the two 'if=' arguments. For giggles, I tested two 'bs=' arguments, and similarly the first of the two 'bs=' arguments was ignored by *dd*. The syntactical pattern for *dd* apparently is to ignore all but the last (right-most) of its arguments. With kindest regards. Yours sincerely.
edit: preliminary conclusion might be that *dd* cannot be directed to stitch together multiple files into an ISO. Albeit I am nowhere near being an expert on this. Kindest regards and best of luck.
The difference between /dev/random & /dev/urandom ?
Great video
you sound just like the gentleman from stuff they don't want you to know , you have the same accent and voice tone. lol
Yeah, I did that. I was trying to put fedora on my 16gb usb stick. I didn't know this at the time, but my machine had a 16gb ssd for ssd caching. They've changed the name for 'ssd caching' now, I can't remember what it is. But I always wonder why my machine loaded stuff so quickly. Anyway, it turns out you when wreck the ssd that's pair with the conventional harddrive for sdd caching, you wreck windows. No great loss, though I, but then I gave my girlfriend the computer and had to fix the problem. I never did, really, the ssd's just sitting there
I just killed a hdd today!! What a coincidence! Mine was due to a forgotten ATA password. tryin to use dd to create a thumbdrive to hack it.
I thought dd meant Disk Duplicator
Would not recommend the first example on a flash boot drive in Mint 19.. You might just run out of space! It's not pretty.. "dd" is very powerful as are most Unix/Linux operators - It is those "what if" modifiers we need to be very afraid of! Train-wrecks are made like this!
THE DIFFICULTY WITH THE DD COMMAND is that when you copy a hard drive it wants to use the exact same size drive! you cannot copy a 100 to a 50 which seems like it makes sense provided you dont think about it! but what happens if the 100 is only using 25 and you want to in all "honesty!" to just copy the 25 to the 50! could you just use the count command! could you find out how much the drive is using and copy that much!
No it doesn't work that way. Data is not stored on black devices that neatly either. It tends to be spread across the available space so the only thing dd can do is copy all of it. There are more complex tools like CloneZilla that will do what you're talking about. :)
@@EzeeLinux i was of the opinion that clonezilla was for windows and not Linux.
@@charlesklein7232 ColneZilla IS Linux... :)
@@EzeeLinux can it use different size disks?
@@charlesklein7232 It can do ll kinds of things... clonezilla.org/
I'm not afraid to admit that I misread the title
dd is the best command Hey Hey Hey ! lol
cud sum1 dew 65536 by 15625000 ????? imanatryit
thanks man ! yer GRATE!
Disk Destroyer LOL
ISO = International Standards Organization.
Kill HD with dd? Sounds like a great reason NOT to use it. Bye!
Fear of the terminal is a treatable condition. You really should get help for that. LOL :)
*I used to be a heavy DOS batch file user who spent many years fighting off the graphical GUI.* Yeah, I remember when Assembly programming was all the rage, in some circles. Now, I am a confirmed high level Linux DE GUI kind of guy. Use the terminal at your own risk, installing rogue programs, in Linux, like Chrome. Once I did manage to destroy one HD fooling around in Windows. Those days are over for me, even though I can now buy decent used computer hardware and HDs dirt cheap. It is simply NOT worth the headache / nightmare. I basically bought my current desktop computer at what is called a Goodwill Warehouse Computer Store, for $5 USA, precisely because Microsoft Stopped supporting WindowsXP. It is a multimedia Dell duo core Intel Desktop, which is the fastest computer that I have ever own. Hard Disks are sold separately. I bought a 500 GB SATA for it, dirt cheap. I am definitely a good enough kind of guy. I switched over to Goodwill used equipment when computer fairs stopped coming to town. Rest assured that no homeless person ever buys computer equipment from Goodwill.
You might as well understand that GUI might avoid some (or even most) of the pitfalls of typos in the dreaded terminal, but you do lose a lot of functionality... AND you don't actually avoid ALL those pitfalls either.
Any software or coding lingo' or other utility that is sufficiently advanced for technical progress is also inherently dangerous...
At the end of the day, when someone finally invents something that is truly idiot-proof, only and idiot will actually want to use it. :o)
John Gohde it's not that hard
@@EzeeLinux lol :)