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In my question about copying with dd one of the commentors pointed out the method of filling the unused space with 0s. Is there a way for a dd of a 80 GB hard drive to be minimal in size?

Now after reading up a bit it seems like I would have to install a special program there (which would lead to quite some overhead in my company as I would have to get a clearance for that program, .... ). I thought a bit how I could avoid this and got an idea although not sure if it is of any use there and thus my question here:

  1. The partition in question is the only one on the hard drive (I'm running linux via live cd).
  2. The partition in question is a NTFS partition and will hold windows

So the idea is basically I make dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda and THEN reinstall windows there.

Would that be feasible? Thus should it provide the same effect as filling up the empty parts of the hard drive after an install would have?

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Thomas
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    It's better than nothing, but it may not compress that well if numerous files are written during the installation that are later being deleted. Just give it a try and see if it's sufficient for your use case. Otherwise you can always use a specialised tool for that, which understands the semantics of the underlying file system, e.g. partimage. Note that partimage's NTFS support is experimental, but there are other tools as well, with varying NTFS support. – Marco Jan 18 '16 at 11:54

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