On Fri, 20 Jan 2012, Yaron wrote: > On Fri, 20 Jan 2012, wes smith wrote: > >> One does not simply throw a harddrive into Mordor. > > I need to put that on a t-shirt. Or maybe a twinkie. Hostess may go out of business, so hurry to buy that Twinkie, but once you have one, you have time because they have a shelf life of 100,000 years. But seriously -- regarding /dev/zero -- does anyone think there are any *real* worries about data recovery after you've filled the drive with zeros? I know if I was working on a secret project at Microsoft, I wouldn't fill my old drive with zeros and then hand it to developers at Apple or Oracle, but if we're talking about giving a personal hard drive to someone who just wants to use it in their personal computer, isn't use of /dev/zero plenty? Jeremy pointed out that /dev/urandom would use random bits. I would think that /dev/urandom would be a better choice than /dev/zero. Is there any reason to prefer /dev/zero? In other words, isn't this a really good answer: dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/<drive> Is it really even necessary to do that twice? Related question: Every drive on my system seems to get three entries in /dev like so: /dev/sdb /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb2 To properly mess up that drive, can I just do this?: dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb Or do I have to do this?: dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb1 Because sdb1 seems to be the mounted partition with the data. Mike