[wtallis]

> Yes, I've personally bumped into this on desktop and unattended server installs - numerous times.

Name and shame, please. Because your spurious complaints about SSD write endurance haven't exactly established your credibility, and you do otherwise seem to be postulating that non-standard nonsensical actions will somehow insert themselves into the process under discussion.

> I'm offering you concrete real world examples of why you should avoid the hack and you're simply ignoring them

No, you're not offering any concrete real-world examples. You're offering hypothetical examples of how a malicious user might be able to trip up a non-specific hypothetical automated OS installer.

> At this point I'm considering this not only to be offering up worst-practice advice, but actively trolling. Possibly the worst case of "a little knowledge is dangerous" I've seen recently. Regards

You are the one who called something "bad advice" but three comments later have yet to prove that it could ever fail in practice. I'm not trolling, and I'm not saying that a dd to the first 1GB of a drive is the best way to clean a drive. I'm just taking exception to your unfounded claims about what "could" go wrong.

[jabberwcky]

You are literally commenting on the thread for a blog post describing the mess that occurs when a drive is incorrectly erased. JFC

[wtallis]

Look, I get that you don't like the advice to overwrite the first 1GB of a drive, probably because it strikes you as inelegant and suboptimal. But you've done a horrible job of identifying any real problems with that method, and it's certainly simpler and more reliable than the procedures in the blog post that didn't work. And your proposed "portable, reliable, robust" method is by any measure less portable, and not available at all on macOS.