[clue] secure erase techniques?

Mike Bean beandaemon at gmail.com
Wed Jun 1 09:07:07 MDT 2011


No harm, no foul, it's not a particularly fast Celeron, so I don't mind
letting it run long, I just wasn't sure what to expect.

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 8:15 AM, Will <will.sterling at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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