[Gllug] Disk Wipe

[Jason Clifford]

On Mon, 24 May 2004, FORSTER, David wrote:

> I want to perform a secure wipe of a disk. You know the type of thing where
> you overwrite the data on the disk with (pseudo)random bytes before marking
> it as deleted in the FAT (or equivalent). The disk in question has a single
> formatted partition (not sure if it's FAT32 or NTFS) and I want to erase all
> the data securely, I don't care if I lose the partition table or not because
> it will be repartitioned etc. anyway.
> 
> Ideally I would like to be able to use a Knoppix CD to do this, and if
> anyone can suggest a method that I can use which will either wipe individual
> files OR whole disks then that would be the icing on the cake :o)

The best method is likely to depend upon how secure you want to be. If you 
just want to ensure that nobody can trivially read the data when you can 
probably get away if a simple "dd if=/dev/urandon of=/dev/hda1" assuming 
it's the first partition on the first IDE drive.

Jason Clifford
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