[plug] HDD Erasure

Leon Brooks leon at cyberknights.com.au
Sun Nov 13 14:22:08 WST 2005


On Saturday 12 November 2005 23:13, Tomasz Grzegurzko wrote:
> cat /dev/random > /dev/hda

No, cat /dev/urandom unless you have hardware randmness support else 
your machine will stall-on-read waiting for more randmness to arrive.

You also need to do this several times. To my way of thinking, if you 
began by writing the disk's inverse over the top of itself and then 
poured several layers of randomness on top of that, you'd do well.

If you really, really want the data erased and don't care what happens 
to the drive in the process, a gas axe does a fairly thorough job:

    http://www.armourarchive.org/essays/sasha_metal_cutting/#18

Cheers; Leon

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