Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Preparing a laptop for sale

[Grant]

>> I checked on it after a few hours and it said "No space left on
>> device" and the process had exited.  I rebooted the system without the
>> key inserted and unfortunately it came back up to the normal HD so
>> nothing has been wiped.  Any idea what I did wrong?
>
> Does the USB stick still boot? It looks like you wiped the wrong device.

Bingo, right as usual!  Apparently I wiped the USB stick.  I ran fdisk
and mk2fs -j again (do I want journaling?) and reinstalled Damn Small
Linux on the stick.  For some reason the laptop tell me "missing
operating system" when I try to boot from the stick now.  I need to
test it on other systems.

> Incidentally, if you want to use dd, adding bs=4096 speeds it up quite
> significantly.

Thanks, will do:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4096

- Grant