Can't I get a /dev/one?

William M. Quarles walrus at bellsouth.net
Wed Jul 14 05:03:37 UTC 2004


Mike Fedyk wrote:
> Jim Higson wrote:
> 
>> On Wednesday 14 July 2004 00:02, William M. Quarles wrote:
>>  
>>
>>> Okay, so there is a /dev/zero.  Shouldn't there be a /dev/one, too?  Is
>>> there any way that I can fill a file or device full of ones?
>>>   
>>
>>
>> Btw, why do you want this?
>>
> Yeah, just run badblocks -w on the drive and be done with it... ;)
> 

Good guess!

Well, that's an idea.  And I'm trying it.  It's yet to tell me anything 
bad, though, which all of the DOS-mode Windows programs have complained 
about bad sectors already (it does produce output upon each error, 
doesn't it?).  I'm a physicist and I believe that their should be a way 
to coax bad blocks out of being bad.  However, I'm not sure that 
badblocks is writing the patterns in a way that is conducive to the 
coaxing.  Actually, I know one reason that it may not be conducive is if 
it fails to write and read with one number pattern on a block, it would 
note that block as being bad and go on to the next: however, my coaxing 
theory would require all of the patterns to be written to the disk, and 
in an order that causes all of the bits to be flipped frequently.  There 
is also a federal procedure for the binary code that is to be written to 
a drive to make sure that it old data is wiped clean, I need to look 
that up and try it.

However, since you brought up badblocks, I found that it does allow any 
specified pattern to be written, which is good, because that may allow 
me to do what I want.  It may take a while to specify an entire kilobyte 
in hex, though.

It seems that there should be some command to take a file full of zeros 
and negate it all so that they become ones: which hypothetically would 
work on a block device also.

Peace,
William






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