[SOLVED] Complete Delete

[jmadero]

hi All,

What's the best complete delete program that I can use easily? I am considering selling my external hard drive but I want to run something over at least twice to ensure that the 11110000000000 looks like 010101000010001 I don't want the typical delete which is just ./ in place of the first character. Thanks all!

[oz]

Check out DBAN to see if it might work for your needs:

Darik's Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe

[Krendoshazin]

There are two methods I use, both of them are done from a second distro on a second hard drive; a livecd will do just fine. The commands are 'shred -zv /dev/hda', which will fill the drive with random data a total of 25 times and doing one last pass to write zeros over it. The second command is a little more complex:

for i in 1 2 3 4; do
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda
done

This will cause dd to fill the drive to the maximum with random data a total of four times. You can do 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda' afterwards to zero the drive if you'd like.

While shred may pass 25 times over the hard drive only about 4 of those passes are truly random, so for me the only real benefit of shred is that it's more verbose. Personally, however, I tend to prefer good old dd. Don't forget to replace /dev/hda with your correct drive of course.

[HROAdmin26]

Something to consider...

Typically, dd with a single pass will be fine - you can source /dev/zero for a faster wipe if you don't care that drive will "look" like it's been wiped.

You can also use the link above to find out more about cleaning the "G list" if you're really thorough.

[jmadero]

thanks for the info everyone. I'm going to go ahead and use dd to all 0's, I don't care if it looks wiped, just want everything to be gone so whoever I sell to has no chance of getting my personal files.

[bigtomrodney]

I'd agree with HROAdmin on this. In a past life however I recommended DBAN to my company who were using an unreliable old method of blanking discs. That's unreliable as in it didn't even attempt a wipe half the time. Anyway, after sneaking DBAN in to get the job done it caught on and is now the standard approved method for the whole enterprise.

I'd bet my lunch money that no one would verify that story, brother gets no thanks at all haha.