How to wipe a HD?

[Thomas Cameron]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Vinicius" <cviniciusm at terra.com.br>
To: <fedora-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2005 10:09 AM
Subject: How to wipe a HD?


> Hello,
>
> How to wipe a HD, please?
>
> Atte.,
> Vinicius.

Depends on how you mean.  Do you mean that you want to securely destroy 
everything and make sure that no one can ever read it, or just clear the 
partition table so that you can start with a blank disk?

If you want to securely wipe the drive you can do a couple of things.  Have 
a look here for some commercial solutions.  Or you can just boot off of the 
first FC CD in  rescue mode and run the command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

Once the dd command hits the end of your disk it will end.  If you want to 
*really* scrub your drive, many security experts recommend doing this seven 
times.

You can also make one big partition on the drive using fdisk and then run 
the command:

mkfs.ext3 -c -c /dev/hda1

This does a destructive read-write test.  On my 250GB drive it took nearly a 
full day to do this.  Again, you should do it seven times if you are really 
concerned about it.

If you want to wipe a drive that you are getting rid of, I recommend a 
5-pound sledge hammer.  Much faster and works out frustrations.  :-)

If you just want to delete the partition table, issue the command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda count=1

Thomas