* Christos Zoulas:
> I would not bother zeroing the disk... It just takes a lot of time
> and serves little purpose.

There is one purpose: Check to see whether the disk passes a minimal
health check. I know that it's only an unreliable test, but considering
that I had to return several *new* disks in the last few years that were
DOA in this respect, it's apparently not without merit :( 

I promised myself to never skip a simple dd. Not on a brand new disk (I had to
return a samsung, two Maxtors and a WD so far), and certainly not on a
second-hand disk.  There's nothing more frustrating than finding out at the end
of a migration that the new disk you bought has a bad block somewhere where
newfs didn't scribble :-/

OTOH, I'd do a dd on the c device, and start from scratch (new MBR, new
partition table, new disklabel)

-- 
Martijn van Buul - pino@dohd.org