ZEROFILL (English)
Published by on Saturday, February 8, 2025
Introduction
ZEROFILL writes zeros on the empty disk space for the selected drive. It helps virtual machine, and disk compression software to compact the allocated space in the volume, and so on reducing its disk usage.
Usage
ZEROFILL [drive:]
Examples:
ZEROFILL C:
Will fill with zeros all available space in drive C.
Technical details
ZEROFILL has been specially optimized to run on pure DOS enviroments, no matter if the are on the top of physical machines, or virtual machines. It is written using Open Watcom C++ 2.0 beta, with plain C language using DOS tiny memory model in order to keep it compact.
FAT32 partitions are explicitilly supported since version 2, its 64 bit arithmetic should make it support volumes of up to 256 GB in size, depending if DOS is able to properly inform about it on service 36h. If not, it will only be able to fill reported size at most.
Sponsors
Download
- DOS binaries and source code (12 Kb. in ZIP format).
History
2.05 - 2025/02/08
- Fixed display with large terabytes available (Fritz Mueller).
2.04 - 2025/02/05
- Printed a progress when deleting temporary files (Fritz Mueller).
- Tested with DOSBox-X 2025-02-01.
- Minor code optimizations and cleanup.
2.03 - 2025/02/04
- Fixed to be compatible with FreeDOS (Fritz Mueller, Bernd Böckmann).
- Tested to be compatible with DR-DOS TaskMgr Multitasker and Taskswicher R2.03.
- Tested to be compatible with VirtualBox with EDR-DOS r20250125 image as well as DOSBox-X 2025-01-01 (MS-DOS 3.30 to 7.10).
2.02 - 2025/01/31
- Checked supplied parameter is a valid letter (Jim Hall).
- Improved UPX compression.
- Upgraded to Open Watcom 2.0 beta (Jan 29 2025).
- Minor code optimizations and cleanup.
2.01 - 2025/01/30
- Changed temporary file naming convention from ZEROFILL.XXX to ZEROXXXX.FIL in order to support up to 9999 files instead of 999 (Fritz Mueller).
- Added a question at the end of the process to confirm deletion of temporary files (Fritz Mueller).
- Upgraded to UPX 4.2.4.
- Minor code optimizations and cleanup.
2.00 - 2025/01/30
- Support extended FAT32 drives with 7305 DOS service if available (EDR-DOS, FreeDOS, DOSBox-X).
- Increased speed by generating temporary 1GB files instead of 500MB files as in previous version.
- Upgraded to Open Watcom 2.0 beta (Oct 31th 2024).
- Upgraded to UPX 4.2.3.
1.09 - 2022/04/10
- Upgraded to Open Watcom 2.0 beta (Mar 14th 2022).
- Upgraded to UPX 3.96.
1.08 - 2020/06/15
- Added missing _dos_close to avoid lost clusters (Valentine).
1.07 - 2020/03/26
- Upgraded to Open Watcom 2.0 beta (Mar 26th 2020).
- Fixed typo in source comments.
1.06 - 2017/07/12
- Upgraded to Open Watcom 2.0 beta (Jul 12th 2017).
- No source code changes.
1.05 - 2017/05/03
- Upgraded to Open Watcom 2.0 beta (May 5th 2017).
- Upgraded to UPX 3.92.
- No source code changes.
1.04 - 2016/10/02
- Upgraded to Open Watcom 2.0 beta (October 2th 2016).
- Better UPX compression with –crp-ms=999999.
- Slight documentation updates.
- No source code changes.
1.03 - 2016/03/31
- Slightly reduced file size.
- Removed some source code warnings reported by CppCheck.
- Upgraded to UPX 3.91.
1.02 - 2012/09/09
- Minor source code cleanup, cosmetic changes, and portability improvemets (Rugxulo).
- ZEROFILL.COM now packed with UPX 3.08 (Rugxulo).
- ZIP file now packed with KZIP.
1.01 - 2012/08/24
- Minor optimizations.
1.00 - 2012/08/23
- Initial public version.
License
ZEROFILL is provided free of charge covered by the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
Links
- Official ZEROFILL's website: nikkhokkho.sourceforge.net/static.php?page=ZEROFILL.
- Official author's website: www.javiergutierrezchamorro.com.
Awards
