Creating Blank Images for Testing Filesystems

If, like me, you want to test a new filesystem or hardware speed without risking damage to one of your partitions, here’s a small tip that allows you to create a blank disk image to work with:

  dd if=/dev/zero of=./mon_image.img bs=1M count=128
  

or

  dd if=/dev/zero of=./10M.img bs=10m count=1
  

The second line is more for BSD systems.

Here, I’ll have a 128 MB image. Change the last number if you want a different size.

Now, all that’s left is to format the partition and start experimenting:

  mkfs.ext3 mon_image.img