On 05/29/2009 09:46 PM, Robert L Cochran wrote:
On 05/29/2009 05:44 PM, Alan Cox wrote:
'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).
Whoopeeedoo. Thats still not the correct way to erase a disk.
Use security erase, that is why it is there.
Thanks very much to all who responded! I'm going to use Alan's
suggestion first of all and if necessary a mixture of everyone else's.
For good measure maybe I'll dump a pound or so of salt in a gallon of
nice hot water and drop the hard drive in and wait for signs of rust
to appear. Ha ha!
Thanks again!
Bob
I bet you all want to know what I did to the hard drive. Well, maybe you
don't. First off, I tried to find out of the drive has a secure erase
feature.
# hdparm -I /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Invalid exchange
# hdparm -i /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed: Invalid argument
[It does not seem to have a secure erase feature.]
[So I did this:]
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
dd: writing `/dev/sdb': No space left on device
28630+0 records in
28629+0 records out
30020272128 bytes (30 GB) copied, 1579.48 s, 19.0 MB/s
#
...and tomorrow, I will remove the circuit board from the drive, and if
time allows, try out the brine-and-cola treatment. Or perhaps I'll
disassemble the drive into parts for my own education.
Thanks everyone!
Bob
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