On Sun, 22 Jul 2012 16:08:56 +0100, Bruce Cran wrote: > On 22/07/2012 16:01, Wojciech Puchar wrote: > >> 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M' works under Cygwin - or you can > >> just write a load of zeros to \\.\PhysicalDrive0 . > > > > who prevents you to bood live CD or pendrive with FreeBSD (or > > openbsd,netbsd,linux,solaris,whatever usable)? > > Nobody - I didn't say users couldn't boot from a FreeBSD/etc live CD, > but zeroing the disk in Cygwin is an alternative.
Installing Cygwin on a "Windows" PC is nothing an average user could achieve easily. The _idea_ of booting something else is also no typical approach. That's why professional companies offer a paid service so the user does not have to invest his valuable time in educating himself about alternatives what he cannot do _natively_ with his "Windows". It's a simple market decision which seems to work (or they wouldn't care to offer it). Furthermore, in your example using Cygnwin's dd _on_ the disk Cygnwin is currently running from, and the "Windows" it runs on too, doesn't seem like a very good idea. I assume it will result in a bluescreen soon and a _partially_ erased disk. By the way, I remember I had a DD.EXE program on my old DOS system. I'm not sure if such a tool could operate on devices (instead of filesystem-based representations as "drive letters"), but it actually _was_ a DOS-based "copy & convert" utility for the PC. :-) -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
