How to Display dd Progress and dd.sh Script

Upgrading software on Linux / Android boards or devices often involves copying images to an SD card or microSD. In Linux, you’d usually do that with dd, a utility that provides binary copy of data to files or block devices. A typical command would be:

However, during the copy, dd does not show a progress bar by default. But dd actually supports progress report, as indicated in the manpage: you can run dd, and send USR1 signal to display the current progress once, and resume copying. Linux commando explains how to continuously return the progress. First run the dd command:

Open another terminal window to find out the process id:

And use the watch command to send USR1 at regular interval.

You should see dd progress in the first window every 10 seconds. It works, but the output is not very nice because dd will just […]

Command Line Methods to Completly Delete a Hard Drive in Linux

Here are 2 methods to completly dlete the content of an hard drive with dd and shred commands. With those methods you won’t be able to recover the data. This can be useful in case you want to sell,  throw away your hard drive / computer or have doubtful activities. If the partitions you want to delete are system (boot) partitions you’ll need to start your system with a live CD / USB such as SystemRescueCD or GParted. Finding the location of a drive or partition In order to know the exact path for your drive, you can use the fdisk command as root or sudoer: # fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 1887.4 GB, 1887436800000 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 229467 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System /dev/sda1               1          25      200781   83  Linux /dev/sda2              26      229335  1841932575   83  Linux […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC