Re: Wiping hard drives

[Eero Volotinen <eero.volotinen@iki.fi>]

2011/9/13 Aaron Toponce <aaron.toponce@gmail.com>:
> On 09/13/2011 08:04 AM, yudi v wrote:
>>  I will be wiping partitions on my hard drive before sending it back to
>> the manufacturer for replacement.
>>
>> I usually prefer dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX#  for the unencrypted
>> partitions and just over write the first few sectors on the LUKS
>> partition to destroy the header file.
>>
>> I just want to hear some opinions as to what precautions you take before
>> parting with hard drives. I would be very interested to hear from SSD
>> owners.
>
> If the drive has encrypted data, then you don't need to wipe much. I
> would do the following, and call it good:
>
>        dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=100
>
> This will wipe pseudorandom data to the first 100MB of the drive, which
> should wipe out any of the encrypted header information at the beginning
> of the partition. Further, notice that I'm using /dev/sdX rather than
> /dev/sdX#. Sending it to the drive should wipe the bootloader also, as
> well as take out the partition information.

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--
Eero