[Tfug] Wiping out a hard drive

[JD Rogers]

man shred
--
Jeremy D. Rogers, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Biomedical Engineering
Northwestern University



On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 5:39 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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