On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 05:44, Michael Halcrow wrote: > Boot off a Knoppix CD (or a Red Hat installation CD, or a Debian > installation CD, ...). Make sure your drive is not mounted. Assuming > your drive is /dev/hda, run fdisk /dev/hda. Divide the number of > bytes on the device by 1024 to get `x'. > > Then, run: > > dd bs=1024 count=x if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda > > Coincidentally, I just helped my mother do this on her machine last > night. :-)
This is the procedure I use for wiping all our machines and it works great albeit slowly. I tried doing if=/dev/urandom once but that threatened to take a week so I gave up. Alternatively you could use a floppy based distro like tom's root & boot[1]. I've also used a couple programs for secure file deletion which say they'll write random junk into the used sectors many times and then delete the file. I suppose that would be effective although I've never tried to recover it. I've used sterilize[2] and wipe[3]. Both have options for cleaning devices although the sterilize man page says that it's broken. Corey [1] http://www.toms.net/rb/ [2] http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/sterilize.html [3] http://gsu.linux.org.tr/wipe/ ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
