What is Reddit's opinion of dd?

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The Wikipedia article would imply otherwise, but of course there's not really any theory that can be substantiated.

Edit: Best proof may be from Dennis Ritchie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

There is the link for "DD". It's going to wipe beyond recoverable the hard drive (references to sda and sdb) on a server.

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We used it at a datacenter I worked at on the hard drives when a customer cancelled to ensure all of their data was gone before we used the hard drive for a new customer.

Since we're only storing one file we wouldn't actually need a filesystem and could store our video straight on the disk using a tool like dd. See this page.

I don't see, how your question is related to C programming language.

Since you're using a Linux-based OS, you can use dd to easily read/write an ISO image from/to any device.

If you really need to write this program in C, and I will consider you know what C is and how to make applications using it, - start from studying POSIX Programmer's manual, ISO 9660, and libcdio.

Sorry for any misunderstanding, Wikipedia describes "dd" as a command here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

> dd is a command on Unix and Unix-like operating systems whose primary purpose is to convert and copy a file.[1]

If you referred to the elinux.org wiki page, I did not write it, I just linked it here as I find it usefull for OP. It wasn't my intention to spread any misconceptions.

I'd heard that it was short for "data/disk duplicator", but wikipedia says that's all wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)#History

> The name dd is an allusion to the DD statement found in IBM's Job Control Language (JCL),[3][4] in which is an abbreviation for "Data Definition".[5]

TIL

Soweit ich weiß funktioniert DBAN (mehr oder weniger) auch mit SSDs, aber es ist anscheinend nicht zu empfehlen, wenn man mit der SSD später noch irgendwas anfangen möchte, wie ich gerade gelesen habe. 😳

Dann würde ich sagen:

• Software vom Hersteller nutzen, aber das ist wahrscheinlich keine Option, wenn das die einzige Platte/die Systemplatte ist.
• Linux-Live-CD und dann mit <code>dd</code> überschreiben, oder <code>shred</code>den

Soße

No. The confusion between Terabytes and Tebibytes comes into play here.

2 Terabyte drive will hold 2 Terabyte (2x10^9 ) bytes minimum. Formatted, it comes out to (2x10^9 / (1024^3 )) Tebibytes. (1.86 TiB).

The wikipedia article may explain it clearer.

Total storage capacity in Terabytes is a function of the diameter of the platters, number of platters, cylinders, blocks per cylinder and block size. It would be highly unlikely to come out to a nice 'even' number like 2000 Terabytes, or even 2000.4 Terabytes. It would be even more unlikely for two manufacturers to make drives with the exact same capacity.

Back to your original question:

• If you use dd to capture an image file (.img) of your boot sector and your OS partitions, then you can use those images to restore your system. One image per partition and one for the boot sector.
• Check wikipedia for dd here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix) (parens in address break markdown). You're looking for the Master boot record backup and restore part.
• Pay close attention to the data wipe and randomization parts. dd will absolutely destroy all your data, if you tell it to. So be careful, especially with your if and of parts. I have never tried it, but I think it might treat a null input source like /dev/zero.

/u/exoticmatter doesn't really understand the concept of installation and provisioning of an OS (or your question, apparently).

If you are going to set up many R-pi's, the best way to do it is create a single OS image and then copy it to all the subsequent pi's. Basically you copy the whole "hard drive" (r-pis have flash storage, but to linux it appears as a hard disk) to a file one time, as your master image. Then for all subsequent pis, you copy this image file back onto their HDD's. All you need after that is to set up the hostname, which you may want to be unique.

Do do this, look at the [dd command](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix\) ) , it will save you a ton of time over the roundabout and redundant solution of learning "advanced bash scripting".

Wikipedia is your best friend to explain dd. Here is a link for a disk wipe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)#Disk_wipe which will write zero's to the drive.

There is also the dual boot option to try Linux and just install it along side Windows. That way you can use it for school and Linux at home. Most distributions today can mount NTFS file systems so the data can be shared between the OS's. Just an idea.

Yeah, you can't do that. You have to essentially "burn" it to the USB using specialised software, similar to how you burn it to a disc. A good Windows tool that does the job is Rufus. If you are on Linux, you can use the dd command line utility.

Desktop version of /u/samad0's link: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)>

^([)^(opt out)^(]) ^(Beep Boop. Downvote to delete)

The issue is that in windows disk images doesn't see the whole disk properly and ignore unmounted volumes terefore causes an incomplete image. Use a linux OS and use DD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)) and you can then create the complete image with all the partitions. As mentioned below, then use PiShrink to reduce it to the smallest possible size. I use this loads and have no issues.

dd is a small program that will make an exact binary copy of an input to an output.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

In this case you would use the ISO as the input file and the USB drive as the output file.

However, if you specify the wrong output file it can overwrite a lot of data

Just to clarify, if I understand OP correctly, he's talking about dd (also known in the community as "deletedisk" or "destroydisk") it's a UNIX utility used to copy files, thus it can also be used to copy your whole filesystem somewhere else.

Links: wikipedia manpage

dd does not actually stand for destroy disk or delete data, although that is a common joke because one mistake with dd can destroy your disk. The dd command was borrowed from an old job control language that had a similar command and syntax and called it "Data Definition".

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)#History

My heart goes out to all of you

In the kitchen I luckily only once managed to dumb brain something. Coming home from the hospital I saw that I had started to make myself a cup of tea. So I opened the trash, took the tea bag from the cup, threw the bag into the sink and emptied the cup into the trash.

But it reminds me of my encounter with the disk destroyer (A linux program that lets you do a 1:1 copy of a hard disk). Had my storage disk start going bad so I got an identical second one and prepared to clone the old one but fucked up the parameters and in horror watched as the computer dutifully began to copy a completely blank disk onto all my data... And it's not like I wasn't warned many times to make sure my parameters were in the right order.

dd is a very powerful Unix utility:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

typically, my use case is to either

1. make a replica of my disk for migration or backup purposes
2. make a backup of a partition

You'd probably do something like this:

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/output/path/to/newfile.iso

At that point, you can mount the iso. Two things. You'll have to figure out the /dev/fd0 part to match the floppy device and MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT MIX UP "if" AND "of". It's unforgiving and will overwrite whatever "of" points to.

If you’re on a *nix based machine and you’re needing to use dd, be absolutely sure of the file path before proceeding, or you may end up wiping a very important partition and then getting many hours of overtime fixing the mistake while your phone rings off the hook and the emails are non-stop from every person in the office.

That's why you always double check your scripts before running them. Learned that the hard way when I was trying to use the [data destroyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix\)) to copy my data from a semi dead drive to a new one...

Take the drive out and into another PC copy the contents to an image file. Best tool for this is DD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix))

After this you can mount the image and search for your BTC!

Use linux.

Make 1 bootable drive, and use dd to clone it to additional devices.

could even write a bash loop to iterate thru all external devices in /dev/ or all volumes in mount and apply the same dd

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)