[ale] How do I fill a new hard drive with random data to burn it in?

[Phil Turmel]

On 12/30/2012 04:36 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
> I want to fill a new hard drive with random numbers as part of a burn
> in process that I do.  I know I can boot a copy of Ultimate Boot CD
> and do this, but I want to do it from a running Ubuntu installation.
> Once I've filled it with random numbers, I will do a few non
> destructive read write tests with badblocks.  Initially, there is no
> data on the drive, so I don't care about file systems, or partitions.
> I want to write to every bit of user accessible space.  What commands
> would I use?

bare bones, but works pretty much everywhere:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

or if you have shred:

shred -n1 /dev/sdX