[plug] Wiping disks properly

[Leon Brooks]

On Wednesday 29 May 2002 09:43, Carl Gherardi wrote:
> I want it as a corporate solution though, something I can hand a ludite to
> wipe 50 machine which may have multiple partitions, filesystems and
> harddrives. For this I need to propose something with a "nice" interface or
> a commercial solution will be the one considered.

If you can guarantee that they're all IDE, make a boot floppy and get the 
startup to do this:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda &
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb &
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc &
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdd &

Make sure that the floppy is flouro orange and labelled `-ING DANGEROUS - DO 
NOT USE, EVER!' in luminescent flashing blue ink. Keep it locked away.

If they're all on a LAN and have self-booting ethernet cards, the solution is 
even easier. (-:

Cheers; Leon