Re: Wiping hard drives
Am Dienstag, 13. September 2011 schrieb yudi v:
> 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.
For SSDs or harddisk which do encryption internally - with or without
encryption password in BIOS - an ATA Secure Erase should be enough:
http://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase
Search "site:kernel.org secure erase" on Google and use webcache as long
as kernel.org is down.
I wiped a Windows 7 installation very quickly from the Intel SSD 320 in my
new ThinkPad T520. Had to plug in the SSD externally tough, as the BIOS
froze security settings and disabled secure erase for the internel drive.
An ATA Secure Erase does not need much write accesses, which is great for
SSDs: The drive just forgets the key and then is not able to encrypt the
old data anymore.
--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
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