[vox-tech] Wiping Hard Drive

Brian E. Lavender brian at brie.com
Sun Feb 4 15:44:38 PST 2024


On Sun, Feb 04, 2024 at 01:22:46PM -0700, Timothy D Thatcher wrote:
>    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.)

The DBAN should work. I wiped a few drives recently using shred. 
Put the drive in a caddy. Check the device it gets. Shred that device.

# dmesge
shred <device it got ie sdb>

# shred /dev/sdb

Be careful not to shred the device you are using!

Brian
-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture


More information about the vox-tech mailing list