One caveat. You will probably need to boot from a stand alone CD to wipe with dd. Once you wipe the part of the disk with the binary for dd or the swap file, strange and wondrous things will happen. /dev/sdb is the whole drive include the boot sector, the partition table and the partitions. I have long believed that the ancient Egyptians didn't invent mummification. They invented Twinkies. --- Wayne Johnson, | There are two kinds of people: Those 3943 Penn Ave. N. | who say to God, "Thy will be done," Minneapolis, MN 55412-1908 | and those to whom God says, "All right, (612) 522-7003 | then, have it your way." --C.S. Lewis >________________________________ > From: Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> >To: TCLUG Mailing List <tclug-list at mn-linux.org> >Sent: Friday, January 20, 2012 2:17 PM >Subject: Re: [tclug-list] hard disk wiper? > >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 >_______________________________________________ >TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >tclug-list at mn-linux.org >http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20120120/724dbe26/attachment-0001.html>