On Tuesday, May 17, 2011 11:08:21 WestHurley ComputerReCycling wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> Will try to do a more detailed explanation. As mentioned "Normally use
> DBAN on a Bootable Floppy" It is used to erase different Hard Drives.
> Website Info "Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot
> disk that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will
> automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that
> it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or
> emergency data destruction." http://www.dban.org/ It offers many types
> of wiping.
>
> If you just want to write Zeros to the entire Hard Drive was told that
> can use
> "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda will write zeros to every single block of
> the hard drive, including the MBR and partition table." from "Easy
> software to write hdd all 1s or 0s?"
You can also use 'dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda' to fill the hard disk with
random data. You can also do this with the 'wipe' command that are on older
versions of Knoppix CDs (5.1.1 and older), or I imagine you could also do this
using 'shred', although the man page for shred doesn't explicitly list using
it on a device rather than a file.
> Did not realize that a Linux Bootable Floppy is a lot more complicated
> than DOS.
It is and it's not.
The big place where Linux differs from DOS is that Linux doesn't use the BIOS.
This means that in order to access the hard disk, Linux *has* to have a usable
driver available with it. Modules (drivers) for booting can be placed in an
initrd image that the kernel will attempt to load sequentially, or those
drivers can be BUILT-IN to the kernel directly, in which case those drivers
are available right at boot time and if you get it right, no initrd image is
needed at all. The initrd image is /also/ a "filesystem within a file" and
thus has it's own root environment in there in order to run scripts. DOS
doesn't have that either (AFAIK), and instead a DOS boot floppy simply has the
very basic DOS system and then a few executable files, all on the same
filesystem.
> When DBAN boots there is a short time when it lists Linux ... I am
> using DBAN 1.07 (believe used dban-1.0.7_i386.exe 1.7 MB to make the
> Floppies) http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/files/dban/dban-1.0.7/
>
> There is also dban-1.0.7_i386.iso 2006-08-13 2.1 MB and
> dban-1.0.7_sig.zip 2006-08-13 986 Bytes
It's Linux all right -- Linux 2.4.33. The source code contains the config
file they used to build the kernel in ./etc/config/linux-2.4.33. It also
looks like there are some Linux kernel patches included. The root environment
is built on busybox and uclibc. No DOS involved as far as I can tell from
looking at the sources.
> Am wondering if there is an easy way to seperate the Linux boot from the
> DBAN application (like you can with DOS)?
The easiest way to do this is to compile the DBAN application separately,
without making the floppy image. i.e. get the source tar.bz2 file, decompress
it, and compile.
> Any comments or suggestions?
>
> Also is there an easy way to get the Linux kernel info?
Yep -- think I covered that above.
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
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