[plug] wiping a hard disk clean

[Russell Steicke]

On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 03:59:26PM +0800, Ben Jensz wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> Just curious if anyone has any suggestions for something to run under 
> Linux to completely wipe all data from a hard disk, irrespective of 
> filesystem etc?  Some of the disks I'm looking at wiping may have 
> Windows partitions and some have Linux partitons.

 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdXX bs=1M

> Basically such that you couldn't retrieve the data even if you tried hard?

 dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hdXX bs=1M

But this will block waiting for random data quite frequently, so use
/dev/urandom if it's not really critical.

Increasing the buffer size from 1M could be useful to increase the
speed, too.



-- 
Russell Steicke

-- Fortune says:
Every solution breeds new problems.