[Tfug] Wiping out a hard drive

[Jordan Aberle]

I have to meet certain requirements for some of my clients for destroying
data, minimum of 7 passes of random data.  I use Active Kill disk that uses
lots of different algorithms to destroy data.  This is all you will need.
http://www.killdisk.com/

-Jordan


On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Terence Rudkin <trudkin at gmail.com> wrote:

> A bit of added obfuscation
>
> dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/<destination partition> bs=1024
>
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Jeff Breadner <jeff at breadner.ca> wrote:
>
>> 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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>>
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>
>
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