29 May
2009
29 May
'09
2:51 p.m.
On Thu, 28 May 2009 22:29:23 -0400 Robert L Cochran cochranb@speakeasy.net wrote:
I have a hard drive that I need to destroy the data on. What is the most dependable way to do this? Can reformatting the drive as ext3 or ext4 or some other filesystem effectively destroy the existing data?
Is there free software that can write zeroes or some form of nonsense to every storage location?
'shred' is part of coreutils (i.e. installed by default). Doing something like
shred /dev/sdX
as root will write various bit patterns 25 times over the entire drive (see the man page for more options).
Srdan