How-to erase a DVD-RW

[Tim Judd]

Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>>
>> The manpage of growisofs suggests this:
>>
>>       Note that DVD+RW re-formatting procedure does not substitute 
>> for blank-
>>       ing.  If you want to nullify the media, e.g. for privacy 
>> reasons, do it
>>       explicitly with 'growisofs -Z /dev/dvd=/dev/zero'.
>
> which is exactly what i suggested - writing 0 byte disc


that writes binary 0, the ASCII "NUL" character.  /dev/zero is NOT a 
zero-size file.

Untested, and I don't use DVD RW medium as I don't have a need for it yet:

growisofs -Z /dev/cd0=:

the : is interpreted by the csh shell as an always true return value, to 
which you can use to truncate files:
  :>/boot/kernel/kernel  #only the inexperienced may blindly try this.  
DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME OR WORK

Given this logic, it should also return true for an input file.  Try 
it.  I'd be curious to see if it works.

--Tim

>
>>
>>
>>
>>> dvd+rw-format will clear DVD+RW disk.
>>
>> Definitely much easier.
>>
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Polytropon
>> From Magdeburg, Germany
>> Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
>> Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
>>
>>
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