Re: Need to wipe/erase hard drive of iBook G4
On Aug 17 2009, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> You'll be bette off with "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda", BTW since you
> can then check the progress via "kill -USR1",
Well, I really like ddrescue from the gddrescue package for this very
reason. The command to use would be "ddrescue /dev/urandom /dev/hda".
No need to mess with sending processes signals, the complexity of
changing terminals etc.
Not only you see the progress, but you can use it as a sort of benchmark
tool to deal with hard-drives.
I do this when, say, I get a new kernel version (together with other
standard versions), especially when I am dealing with platforms/drivers
that are not that mainstream.
BTW, what about using /dev/zero before (or instead) /dev/urandom?
Of course, if the goal is privacy, then a long time will be needed with
many runs of patterns being written to disk (that is, if your disk
doesn't die before finishing the runs). :-)
It seems that dcfldd would be useful here, but I'm not familiar with it
yet.
Regards, Rogério Brito.
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org
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