My Macbooks motherboard died, I need to backup my drive with my Ubuntu desktop but,..

[kodykhaos]

My Macbooks motherboard died, I want to backup my hard drive and permanently wipe all my personal info and personal documents before sending it off to apple. The hard drive is hooked up via USB to my desktop running Ubuntu but i I've tried numerous chmod commands but nothing seems to work, it always remains to be be read only.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
-Kody

[techieMoe]

My Macbooks motherboard died, I want to backup my hard drive and permanently wipe all my personal info and personal documents before sending it off to apple. The hard drive is hooked up via USB to my desktop running Ubuntu but i I've tried numerous chmod commands but nothing seems to work, it always remains to be be read only.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
-Kody

Did you mount it as root? You should be able to wipe it clean with root privileges.

[kodykhaos]

Did you mount it as root? You should be able to wipe it clean with root privileges.

Well I was successfully able to copy it to my desktop hard drive as root, but i still, even as root can't seem to disable the permissions to access the files, i tried some chown commands, but its not a command I've had a lot of experience with so I'm still kind of a newb to it, and nothing has worked so far. haha.


So basically now i guess the questions I am seeking are:
How can i change the Mac permissions to allow my Ubuntu user access to all of these copied files?
And once I have access to these files to to make sure i got all the files i need off the Mac drive, how do i permanently erase a specific folder on the drive so it cannot be recovered?

[techieMoe]

Well I was successfully able to copy it to my desktop hard drive as root, but i still, even as root can't seem to disable the permissions to access the files, i tried some chown commands, but its not a command I've had a lot of experience with so I'm still kind of a newb to it, and nothing has worked so far. haha.

Have you tried going to the top directory of your copied files and issuing a chmod -R 777 as root user? If you can't change ownership you should at least be able to change permissions.

And once I have access to these files to to make sure i got all the files i need off the Mac drive, how do i permanently erase a specific folder on the drive so it cannot be recovered?

I believe the command you're looking for in that respect is dd, however I'm not familiar with it myself so I'd hold on and see if anyone else has more specific instructions. I don't usually erase drive on that low a level.

[kodykhaos]

Have you tried going to the top directory of your copied files and issuing a chmod -R 777 as root user? If you can't change ownership you should at least be able to change permissions.

I believe the command you're looking for in that respect is dd, however I'm not familiar with it myself so I'd hold on and see if anyone else has more specific instructions. I don't usually erase drive on that low a level.

Well thank you techmoe for all your help so far, it is greatly appreciated.

I tried sudo chmod -R 777 before with no luck but it actually worked now that i tried it used directly as root. So i do have the copied files unlocked but as for the hard drive files it still wont work. Though maybe it wont be necessary to wipe them. I've yet to try it until i find more directly related info on it. As for DD I'm not too familiar with it myself, i did manage however years back when i was new to Linux to accidentally reverse the directory of interest and totally wreck havoc on my system. I know better now but I'm still really cautious of that one. lol

I was thinking maybe sudo shred -z /disk/location? If anyone here has experience with it.

[D-cat]

dd would be for wiping the whole hard drive, say assuming your external hard drive was /dev/sdb:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

would return that drive to a factory state of blank.

If you are only concerned with one directory, shred will probably do you fine... Shred works in file mode, so you have to specify the file. I don't know if it accepts wildcards, I've never tried it. 25 writes is overkill, 1 + a zero is fine. I'd think something like the following:

sudo shred -zvufn 1 /disk/location/*

might work and would be plenty sufficient.

[kodykhaos]

dd would be for wiping the whole hard drive, say assuming your external hard drive was /dev/sdb:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

would return that drive to a factory state of blank.

If you are only concerned with one directory, shred will probably do you fine... Shred works in file mode, so you have to specify the file. I don't know if it accepts wildcards, I've never tried it. 25 writes is overkill, 1 + a zero is fine. I'd think something like the following:

sudo shred -zvufn 1 /disk/location/*

might work and would be plenty sufficient.

I tried using it but it says it can't because it is a directory, I'm trying to erase a entire folder. Perhaps the shred command only works in file mode?

[D-cat]

That's right, it is file only. However, I did find a little script-fu here: http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/mis...tory-tree.html

The command (edited for my less time thing above) is:

find -type f -execdir shred -zvufn 1 '{}' \;

1) Execute it from the directory you want to delete files from
2) Some kernels ignore "execdir". In this case, you can use "exec", but make sure there's no symlinks to other directories first: if it transcends into root (/), that'll be the end of all data you have on this computer.

Let us know how it works.