On 01/29/2015 12:32 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> The target hard drive is supposed to have no file system format (just 
> the low level format from the manufacturer) -- not MS Windows, Mac OS 
> X, or any other file system format.  It is supposed to be "brand new 
> raw".
The way I've always prepped a disk for cloning is to run (booted from a 
live CD and with no other drives in the system for safety):
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=10240k count=100
where X is the actual device letter.  This zeroes out the first 1GB of 
space; you can do more, or less, as long as you zero out the first few 
tens of MB you should be ok.