How to wipe a HD?

ben morse ben at genplan.com
Sat Apr 23 00:49:15 UTC 2005


If you don't care about deleting all the data, a much easier way is:

dd if=/dev/zero/ of=/dev/hda

It will run for awhile (without a progress bar) and then stop.  Check 
the man pages if you want to check the progress of the wipe.
-ben

david walcroft wrote:

> jludwig wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday 20 April 2005 08:34 pm, david walcroft wrote:
>>
>>> Vinicius wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> How to wipe a HD, please?
>>>>
>>>> Atte.,
>>>> Vinicius.
>>>
>>>
>>> Give this a try ,its a boot floppy and overwrites from 1 > 25 times as
>>> selected (but slowly!!!)
>>>
>>> http://staff.washington.edu/idlarios/autoclave/clave03.img
>>>
>>> david >
>>
>>
>> Try man shred
>>
>> Shred is the linux utility for cleaning hard drives.
>>    Delete FILE(s) if --remove (-u) is specified.  The default is  
>> not  to
>>        remove  the files because it is common to operate on device 
>> files like
>>        /dev/hda, and those files usually should not be removed.  When 
>> operat-
>>        ing on regular files, most people use the --remove option.
>>
>>        CAUTION:  Note  that shred relies on a very important 
>> assumption: that
>>        the filesystem overwrites data in place.  This is the 
>> traditional  way
>>        to  do  things, but many modern filesystem designs do not 
>> satisfy this
>>        assumption.  The following are examples of filesystems on 
>> which  shred
>>        is not effective:
>>
>>        * log-structured or journaled filesystems, such as those 
>> supplied with
>>
>>               AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)
>>
>>        * filesystems that write redundant data and  carry  on  even  
>> if  some
>>        writes
>>
>>               fail, such as RAID-based filesystems
>>
>>        *  filesystems  that  make  snapshots, such as Network 
>> Appliance’s NFS
>>        server
>>
>>        * filesystems that cache in temporary locations, such as NFS
>>
>>               version 3 clients
>>
>>        * compressed filesystems
>>
>>        In addition, file system backups and remote mirrors may 
>> contain copies
>>        of  the  file  that  cannot be removed, and that will allow a 
>> shredded
>>        file to be recovered later.
>>
> Autoclave uses Shred and I use ext3 filesystem and Autoclave wiped my 
> disk but I didn't test the disk (WD 120GB) to see how it performed.
>
>   david
>




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