[Tfug] Wiping out a hard drive

[Jeff Breadner]

You might get marginally better performance with:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<destination partition> bs=1024

(bs = block size)  But, it won't be that much faster.  The good news, 
unless you have some well funded enemies with an electron microscope, a 
single pass is enough to wipe out all of your data.  Someone who takes 
the platter apart and scans it with VERY high-end tools might be able to 
tell what data used to be on it, but anyone who's just using hexdump or 
some such thing will only see zeros.

http://www.anti-forensics.com/disk-wiping-one-pass-is-enough

cheers
  Jeff

Linux Media wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I want to wipe out any trace of my existence on a laptop hard drive.
>
> I want to keep the hard drive (otherwise I would hammer the disks 
> until they were shards). I know I have cloned a drive, but not sure I 
> have ever attempted to wiped one out. I do know that when I tried to 
> clone a drive it took forever (24 hours before I gave up). I'm 
> assuming it's somewhat the same process, and assume it would take as 
> long. I believe the command is...
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<destination partition>
>
> Do I want to go with this? If so, is there some switch that would make 
> it faster?
>
> Also, is it true that it's safer to 'zero it out' by doing the above 
> several times?
>
> If the answer is that this will take forever no matter what switches I 
> use, is there some other approach that's effective that would be faster?
>
> Thanks,
> Rocco
>
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