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Authored by: Wol on Friday, September 21 2012 @ 10:13 AM EDT |
The reason for doing that (to sda not sda1) is to persuade the computer it has a
clean factory fresh disk. Makes doing a new install so much easier.
The reason for doing that to sda1 (or any other FAT partition) is that certain
versions of Windows or DOS had a nasty "quirk". They would believe the
partition header over and above the partition table as to the correct size of
the partition. And were well known for writing to the end of the partition and
trashing the partition following if this data were wrong - as often seemed to
happen.
The last use case for this sort of thing is securely wiping a disk. If you don't
specify how much to copy, and just let it run, you end up with a wiped disk that
will need an expensive data recovery firm to get anything back off it. Just what
you need to do before recycling your old disks. I did it a fair bit at one job
when we were dumping our old works computers. It's so simple it amazes me so
many 2nd-hand computers seem to come with sensitive data on them.
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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