Re: Wiping hard drives
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.
You are right. Wiping a whole drive is a long process that's one of the reasons why I started using LUKS containers. Although before setting up Luks I use the urandom as well but it comes to the fore when the drive dies with the platters intact. At least I can rest assured knowing that the data cannot be retrieved easily.
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Kind regards,
Yudi
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