After some storage reorganisation, I have a volume group with a fair chunk of free space. I want to wipe this free space without perturbing any of the existing volumes. Is there an easy way to fill this free space with zeroes or noise? Besides the slight inconvenience, would there be anything wrong with creating a logical volume taking up all the remaining space and filling that up?
1 Answer
Creating a new LV and filling it with zeroes or data from /dev/urandom is probably the easiest way. You could also use pvdisplay -m
or pvs --segments
to get list of used segments on the physical volume(s) and use dd
to fill empty spaces, but that might be too dangerous (you could easily overwrite some metadata by accident).