On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 11:44:31AM -0400, Darren Welch wrote:
> I am looking to draft a corporate policy requiring all hard drives to
> be wiped before being decommissioned, sold, donated, etc.
Good idea.
> The wipe utility must be able to make numerous (up to seven)
> uninterrupted passes and support a wide array of file systems (fat,
> ntfs, etc).
Hmm. I would hope the wiper doesn't care about the filesystem. A hard
drive is a hard drive, no matter what filesystem was on the thing.
> Also, the software must support the ability to assign a particular hex
> character as the wipe character.
Good idea.
My preferred technique is to hook the drive up to a box running any
flavor of Unix, including the BSDs and the Linuxes. The 'dd' utility can
easily satisfy all your requirements.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
That will write a whole mess of zeros to your hard drive. Getting other
values written will require a bit more work, though I would hope
something such as the following would be a good first shot (noting of
course that a smarter implementation would probably go much faster):
# boring.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
while(1) {
printf("%d", argv[1]);
}
}
./boring | dd if=- of=/dev/hda
Yeah, it needs work, but it isn't far from being pretty reasonable.
Note that these device names are for IDE drives under Linux. Under other
versions of Unix-like operating systems the device names will be
different. SCSI drives will be different.
If stochastic differences are sufficient, you could probably get away
with a small shell script such as this:
#!/bin/sh
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda
The urandom device isn't terribly fast, but you may be able to "get away
with" fewer runs due to the more random behavior. <shrug>
Cheers! :)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Jun 21 2001 - 12:05:20 PDT