[ale] Need an iso to wipe hard drives.

[Chris Fowler]

On Fri, 2010-04-16 at 10:07 -0400, krwatson at cc.gatech.edu wrote:

> Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN")
> http://www.dban.org/
> 
> DBAN will not wipe sectors that have been reallocated however, Secure Erase will. This only works on IDE and SATA dirves.
> http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml

now this brings up an good topic for this list.

Here is how I've done it in the past from bash


rm stuff_to_delete
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/file;rm /tmp/file
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/file;rm /tmp/file
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/file;rm /tmp/file

Now the idea is that we first delete the stuff then we fill up disk with
random crap.  dd will error when we've ran out of space and rm will
remove the file.  We do this 3 times.

Not sure if this is good idea or not?

I've got a cronjob on my desktop that creates a 4G file of urandom every
night around 1AM and then deletes it.  Anything I've deleted during the
day should be blown away at night.