[syslinux] [PATCH] Proposal for a pacifier option with mkdiskimage

Dean Graff graff97 at gmail.com
Wed Jan 29 06:01:28 PST 2014


1) Most formatting and partitioning tools, (if any) do not zero devices.
These old partitions, can almost always be recovered. I do not think it is
possible for to create a fix-all-solution-for-USB, unless the entire device
is "zeroed out" , which present huge problems.
2) The average USB takes 2 or 3 hours to zero out properly, due to the slow
flash media writes. (And if you speed up the process with larger block
sizes, this also will cause failure to over write encrypted areas ).
Basically: installers and especially partitioning tools, do not zero
devices out. The only way to even attempt zeroing out a block device with a
pre formulated method, is if you determine the amount of available memory,
compared to the absolute smallest practical ( large enough that it does not
take all day) block size of the device being zeroed.

Anyway i have spent 10000s of hours thinking about this, and am pretty sure
there is no portable cross platform way of creating an efficient block
device zeroing system. without doing some serious programming, and creating
functions for dozens of use case scenarios.

Debian installer : "blah blah would you like to erase all the data on this
device" , and then it proceeds to idle there for 40 hours hacking away at
the hard drive ( i wont even say anything more about this )

Perhaps one of you knows a better way to look at all of this, perhaps a
file in /proc that can be parsed.. or maybe a utility that is already
designed for recognizing USB by manufacturer, size, type etc.

One idea, might be to find the partitions on the disk using `parted's
recovery tool, and then directly over write them, saving the time it would
take to zero out the device...But still this is linux only, and it does not
conform to `mkdiskimage' programming style.

Sincerely  -dean


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