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I was zeroing out my hard drive using the dd command and there was an interruption. What does this mean for the hard drive? If I run the command again, will the zeroing take off from where the interruption occurred or will the entire process start all over again?

PS: I use Ubuntu desktop 20.04.

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It means only the first x bytes (up to the interruption) have been zeroed out. If you run the same dd command again and don't tell it to skip the first x bytes with skip=, it will simply restart writing zeroes from the start of the disk. You'll loose some time, but that's it.

I don't know what you are trying to achieve, but for general reference I would like to point out that there might be better and more efficient tools:

  • SSDs should be erased using Secure Erase. It only takes a few seconds and doesn't wear out the drive.

  • If you want to format the drive or make it part of some RAID/ZFS/BTRFS/whatever array, and your commands are complaining about existing file systems, and you just want to remove all traces of them, wipefs usually does the job in a few seconds.

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