[TriLUG] disk-wiping tool?

Tanner Lovelace lovelace at wayfarer.org
Thu Nov 13 12:41:58 EST 2003


Andrew Perrin wrote:
> Try booting to anything, then doing:
> 
> dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hd{x}
> 
> where {x} is the drive you want to wipe.
> 
> ap
> 

One small correction.  For this you should probably use /dev/urandom
instead because /dev/random will block if there isn't enough randomness
in the random pool.  /dev/urandom will use the randomness in the pool
to generate a pseudo-random sequence and will therefore never block.
So, if you want to get done in a timely fashion, use /dev/urandom
instead of /dev/random when overwriting your harddrive.

Cheers,
Tanner
-- 
Tanner Lovelace | lovelace(at)wayfarer.org | http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
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