Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!solace!eru.mt.luth.se!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: can we clear SWAP? Date: 13 Aug 1996 07:24:23 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 23 Message-ID: <4upaj7$399@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4ujp1c$dbm@metro.usyd.edu.au> <4ul7a6$nk@uriah.heep.sax.de> <4unuao$cng@irz201.inf.tu-dresden.de> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E uk1@irz.inf.tu-dresden.de (Ulf Kieber) wrote: > >> or in other words is it possible to format the swap drive? > > > >You can dd /dev/zero all over it, but obviously, only while it is not > >yet in use (i.e., in single-user mode before swapon has been run). > > Well, actually dd seek=<a 64k worth of blocks> if=/dev/zero ... Why? Ah, you think of our clobbered disklabel... Oh well, but this only happens if swap is the first partition. For most people, the first partition is `a', so it won't hurt. Anyway, seek=15 would have been sufficient (the disklabel is 15 blocks, actually, the entire bootstrap, and the label is in the second block). -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)