Re: Inquiry:How to totally wipe out the entire hard drive
On Sun, Sep 06, 2009 at 11:13:42AM +0100, hadi motamedi wrote:
> Dear All
> Can you please let me know how can I totally wipe out the entire of my hard
> drive under Debian OS ?
> Thank you in advance
> Regards
> H.Motamedi
If you want to wipe out a portion (say the contents of one home
directory) - perhaps use shred.
apt-get install shred ; shred /home/hmotamedi
If you want to nuke the MBR partition table to reinstall an operating
system
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=2
[or hda/hdb/sdb or whatever as appropriate for the particular device]
If you want to wipe an entire drive
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda
repeated a couple of times if necessary.
Better, by far, is to get hold of a copy of DBAN [floppy image/CD image
or even Windows .exe] Runs in memory, uses a Linux kernel to bootstrap a
disk wipe program offering various options.] Using this, you can also
securely delete hard drives before disposing of a machine / securely
remove any pre-existing contents on any drives in a machine you acquire.
It _will_ take a long time, almost certainly longer than you think, even
if you only do write once with random, once with 1's once with 0's.
All best,
AndyC
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