[ale] Need an iso to wipe hard drives.

[Jim Kinney]

That seems like a good way to eradicate deleted files and keep unused space
as pure garbage. Assuming a drive hasn't reallocated a failing sector prior
to the random overwrite, things are good. I've not seen anything (yet) that
will allow selective overwrite of reallocated sectors with defined data
(random) that doesn't also destroy the entire drive contents. I suspect any
tool to do this will have to come from the drive makers  themselves due to
the nature of this low level detail.

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Chris Fowler
<cfowler at outpostsentinel.com>wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
>
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness
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