[clue] secure erase techniques?

Will will.sterling at gmail.com
Wed Jun 1 08:15:55 MDT 2011


I should have recommended /dev/zero instead of /dev/urandom.  For your
purposes it would have been just as good and faster.

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 8:02 AM, Will <will.sterling at gmail.com> wrote:

> It should eventually quit on its own.  The amount of time it will take is
> dependent on how fast your CPU can generate random numbers and how large the
> partition is.
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 5:09 AM, Mike Bean <beandaemon at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> How long would I need to leave this running?   cat /dev/urandom >
>> /dev/sda1 's been going for long about 10 hours now.  Is this something that
>> I'll need to abort or does it terminate on its own?
>>
>>
>> On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 9:04 AM, chris fedde <chris at fedde.us> wrote:
>>
>>> Raymond,
>>>
>>> What does the magic block size do?
>>>
>>>
>>> I'd go with two passes of "cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sdX" as root.
>>>
>>> On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 8:51 AM, Raymond DeRoo <rderoo at deroo.net> wrote:
>>> > Mike--
>>> >
>>> > In short, I'm giving one of my older PC's to a friend's friend.  One of
>>> > those, I don't need it, things.  In any case, in terms of secure
>>> destruction
>>> > of drives, my father's always taught me to disassemble the drives and
>>> throw
>>> > the heads and the platter out separately.  Can't do it here, they need
>>> the
>>> > drives, so I thought I'd ask for advice in case we have members who
>>> might
>>> > know a thing or two about this sort of thing.  I figured I'd probably
>>> just
>>> > boot it to a live CD and nuke the partitions, and that's probably
>>> enough,
>>> > after all, I don't need like a military-grade erase, but I'll settle
>>> for
>>> > making it @#$@#$@$ hard to recover.  Any suggestions are welcome.
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > # dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=387 count=<size of disk in bites> /
>>> 383
>>> > Recover from this *IS* still possible, but generally requires someone
>>> who is
>>> > *VERY* knowledge about drives to do as such.
>>> > .r
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>>
>>
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