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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