[Tfug] Drive erase options?

[bpoag at comcast.net]

The best drive destroyer is everyone's friend, dd. 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdwhatever bs=1048576 

This will fill your drive with zeros starting at byte 0, block 0, sector 0, track zero, and burn nothing but zeros until the very end of the platter. 
If you want to live in a fantasy CSI:Tucson world where scary terrorists are out to steal your hard drives to look for things that will help their plans on world domation, replace "zero" with "random" up there. Your mouse movements will provide enough natural entropy to keep the stream sufficiently pseudorandom, and deeply annoying to the terrorists who wander our streets in search of consumer-grade hard disks. 

But Arabs are great at math, you say? Perhaps so, they invented our numbering system after all,, but you can get around that as well. Just destroy the drive. You'll need a good pair of needle nose pliers and a good sized hammer, but it only takes a few minutes to crack one open and expose it to the elements. A few solid hammer hits paying particular attention to the spindle, the platters, the actuator, and the controller will certainly make any would-be terrorist look for an easier path to martyrdom. There's some stuff in the Qur'an about how to handle a meteorite, but nothing in the Qur'an about hard drive repair. * 

Hope that helps. 
Cheers, 
Bowie 

* Ask a Muslim. Most of them hate terrorists too. 




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nathan England" <nathan at paysonlinux.org> 
To: "Tucson Free Unix Group" <tfug at tfug.org> 
Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 8:54:51 AM GMT -07:00 U.S. Mountain Time (Arizona) 
Subject: Re: [Tfug] Drive erase options? 

On Tuesday 12 January 2010 19:26:54 Tom Rini wrote: 
> Hey guys. I'm looking to clean up some odds and ends around the house 
> and looking for good and preferably Linux based (since at least some of 
> the machines are powerpc) disk erasers. Standalone (like memtest86) is 
> also possible, at least for some of these I think. Options? Thanks! 
> 

Nothing fast is good and nothing good is fast. With that being said, I really 
like badblocks. I boot a machine with a disc image I have with badblocks on 
it, and it boots to a command line. I run 

badblocks -svfw /dev/sdX 

And walk away for a few hours. When it is done, the drive is CLEAN. 

Of course, that is only because ammunition has gotten so darn expensive! Gotta 
save what I have! 

Nathan 

_______________________________________________ 
Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org 
Subscription Options: 
http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug_tfug.org 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tfug.org/pipermail/tfug_tfug.org/attachments/20100114/56c29cfb/attachment-0002.html>