RE: Securely Wiping a Hard Drive

From: Mark Watts (m.wattsat_private)
Date: Tue Oct 02 2001 - 04:03:44 PDT

  • Next message: Alvin Oga: "Re: Securely Wiping a Hard Drive"

    Boot from a linux CD/Floppy so that you can get to a shell, then issue 
    the following command:
    
    yes "GARBAGE" | dd of/dev/hda bs=1024k > /dev/null 2>&1
    
    This will write the characters GARBAGE, repeated accross the whole disk
    If you repeat this with different strings, you get more security.
    
    Mark.
    
    P.S. If you want a full script to do this and ask you nice questions 
    (like which drive, what pattern etc), give me a buzz.
    
    
    
    On Monday, October 01, 2001 6:22 PM, Henderson, Pete 
    [SMTP:pete.hendersonat_private] wrote:
    > I am looking for a utility that I could use to wipe hard drives using
    > a boot
    > disk.  To completely overwrite the entire drive, I would need to boot
    > to a
    > different device.  Correct?  If I slave a hard drive and boot to the
    > master,
    > doesn't Windows still create a recycle bin on the slave?  Would
    > mounting it
    > with Linux be a better solution?  Which Linux program works best?
    >
    > I am only looking to delete company data, not classified....I know
    > about the
    > NISPOM specs.
    >
    >
    > Pete Henderson
    >
    > pete.hendersonat_private
    >
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