i’ve being running dd as advised by AT for over 5 hours now on a 750GB HDD, so, taking into consideration (3Ghz single core 775 CPU & 1GB DDR2) approximately how long should it take ish
as DBAN took about 7 hours i assume dd will take about the same amount of time
am i correct ?
Depends on the size and capacity of the drive, but with the default byte size of 4 bytes, it will definately take a long time, yeah. Usually I recommend dd’ing overnight. But, if time’s a factor, you can manually change the byte size by appending bs= as an argument to dd. For example, if you were zeroing out the drive at /dev/sda and wanted a byte size of 64K:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=65536cheers AT 
but system froze again
BTW: iḿ pretty sure is my USB mouse ad during debian boot it was unable to enumerate USB device on port 1 & when i use the other USB port it is then unable to enumerate device on port 2, of does anybody think the USB root hub is faulty ?
my money is on the mouse, am i correct ?
BTW: iḿ also using the HDD i partially dd`d, is that a good idea, it seems to work fine with Kubuntu Hardy
Seems to be happening a lot. Did you test the RAM yet?
not yet, but itś on the list
anyway having another prob, trying to logon to asda.co.uk, it requires java / javascript (it doesnt say but when mouse over login, bottom right of browser (FF 2.0.0.18) says java/login)
i think the prob is related to the huge transition Linux is going through to make it more noob friendly, what do you think ?
I am no Debian (or any OS for that matter) expert but when I used to have Debian installed on my PC (or my laptop) I always used to get this error. Never stopped me from doing anything nor did it ever make the system freeze.
This point aside, I always found Debian to be “inconvincible” when it comes to enumerating USB ports… 
thats put my mind at rest, thankies