How to wipe a HD?

[ben morse]

When I said deleteing, I meant securly deleting.
-ben
ben morse wrote:

> 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
>>
>