Mark Knecht wrote: > Sold my laptop on Ebay. It was dual boot Gentoo/XP Pro and had > financial data on it. I'd like to pretty securely wipe the drive > before shipping. I've already deleted all 10 partitions and written > new partitions on which are different sizes and different file > systems. What simple command can Ido to write data to the whole drive?
Assuming your hard disk is /dev/hda, I'd do: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=8M Then go have a coffee. If you want it more secure, go for this, a few times in a row (at least 7, I read): dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda bs=8M However, this will take a *long* time, as /dev/urandom is quite slow. But it will make the data unrecoverable even with expensive means. -- Remy Remove underscore and suffix in reply address for a timely response. -- [email protected] mailing list
