Hi, On 22/04/2008, Mark Rogers <mark@quarella.co.uk> wrote:

Are there any tools around that can clean empty space on disks?

I'm not too worried about doing this for secure deletion purposes, I just want to get a good result from a compressed image of the disk.

NB: I tend to use: dd if=/dev/hdb | gzip > hdb.dd.gz .. but there's probably a much better way to do this. Usually it's an NTFS disk but in this particular case it is ext3.

At work, we dd or cp /dev/zero to a file on the filesystem on the device, then when we run out of space, we delete the file. You should find that the image then compresses very well. Hope this helps. Srdjan