begin quoting Todd Walton as of Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 11:54:32AM -0800: > On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 10:47:11 -0800, Stewart Stremler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > nohup sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda & exit > > > > -Stewart "Not tried it. Ought to try it. Surely it'll work?" Stremler > > Depends on the filesystem you're using, but you'd probably want to > overwrite the hard drive several times. I was reading a magazine > article in 2000 that said forensics people can read data from a hard > drive that's been overwritten up to 9 times. Surely that number has > gone up since then. (The 9, not the 2000.)
Carl raises a good point. > But wouldn't the command drop out at some point (before completing) > due to it or the kernel trying to access disk and finding trash? dd > might even overwrite itself, if it's in swap. Gus reminded me that I *have* seen this done. > And then there's the whole waiting-for-random-data thing. "Please > wait to crash in my door while I wiggle my mouse around." May as well > make it /dev/zero. You'd think they'd start shipping motherboards "randomness" chips by now. Didn't some of the old architectures have this? (Sample thermal noise or somesuch.) -Stewart "101 things to do with a cluster you're about to rebuild" Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
