[ale] Need an iso to wipe hard drives.

[Brian Pitts]

On 04/16/2010 11:31 AM, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> 
> NIST has a sanitation paper that says disk drives of 20GB or larger
> capacity are not recoverable even via laboratory means after a single
> wipe with zero's.
> 
> So your just wasting cpu cycles using /dev/urandom.  Just use
> /dev/zero.  And just do it once.

The link you shared to a discussion of that paper a while back is dead.
Do you know of any more sources? I'd really like to have something to
wave at the "you must wipe it 27 times" people.

> Also, ext2/3 reserves x% of the drive for root, so if your doing the
> above as a normal user, your missing that x%.  I think x% is 5%, but I
> don't recall for sure.  And 5% of 1TB is 50GB, so it is a big deal.

At Free IT Athens, we run sfill and sswap from the secure-delete suite
of tools as a post-install action to securely erase all unused space on
a system being refurbished. sfill sipes the disk space and inode space,
and sswap takes care of the swap partition.

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts