[vox-tech] Wiping Hard Drive

[Timothy D Thatcher]

Hi Bob,

I generally agree with Bill K, though I haven't used that software he
mentions particularly; you'll want to _not_ boot off the drive you want to
wipe to be sure you catch all the data. Otherwise you risk chugging along
with the wipe until you hit something critical in the filesystem at some
unknown point, and the system will destabilize/crash before the dd is
finished.You could be left with a) a drive you can't boot and b) no idea
how much of your data is actually left on there that could potentially be
recovered by the next person.

I'd suggest using a live boot USB/CD/etc of some sort, or swap the drive
into another machine, or pull it and use a USB-SATA adapter on another
machine, something like that.

You may also check out the "shred" command, which is probably already
installed by default, or "wipe", which is probably not (but should be in
your distro's regular repos.)

-Tim


On Sat, Feb 3, 2024 at 12:43 PM Bob Scofield <scofield at omsoft.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I want to recycle an old desktop. I'm planning to wipe the hard drive
> with this command:
>
> dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=1M
>
> Can I just run this from the command line? Or do I have to use a flash
> drive with Linux on it and run it from the command line of the Linux on
> the flash drive?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Bob
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> vox-tech at lists.lugod.org
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