From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from lists.gentoo.org ([140.105.134.102] helo=robin.gentoo.org) by nuthatch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1ELSau-0006J5-L4 for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Fri, 30 Sep 2005 21:39:05 +0000 Received: from robin.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by robin.gentoo.org (8.13.5/8.13.5) with SMTP id j8ULUZeX030116; Fri, 30 Sep 2005 21:30:35 GMT Received: from smtp107.mail.sc5.yahoo.com (smtp107.mail.sc5.yahoo.com [66.163.169.227]) by robin.gentoo.org (8.13.5/8.13.5) with SMTP id j8ULQraA025305 for ; Fri, 30 Sep 2005 21:26:56 GMT Received: (qmail 15552 invoked from network); 30 Sep 2005 21:34:29 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO ?192.168.2.100?) (richard?j?fish@68.230.97.177 with plain) by smtp107.mail.sc5.yahoo.com with SMTP; 30 Sep 2005 21:34:28 -0000 Message-ID: <433DAF69.5060700@asmallpond.org> Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 14:34:33 -0700 From: Richard Fish User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.6 (X11/20050807) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Good command for wiping a hard drive? References: <5bdc1c8b0509301334n7aff4434j449f085a4a4e8336@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Archives-Salt: 2eace960-f5ae-444f-a3d5-a625d9adc35d X-Archives-Hash: eb6310d3e4314982561224c44b2951a4 Remy Blank wrote: >Mark Knecht wrote: > > >> Sold my laptop on Ebay. It was dual boot Gentoo/XP Pro and had >>financial data on it. I'd like to pretty securely wipe the drive >>before shipping. I've already deleted all 10 partitions and written >>new partitions on which are different sizes and different file >>systems. What simple command can Ido to write data to the whole drive? >> >> > >Assuming your hard disk is /dev/hda, I'd do: > > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=8M > >Then go have a coffee. If you want it more secure, go for this, a few >times in a row (at least 7, I read): > > dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda bs=8M > >However, this will take a *long* time, as /dev/urandom is quite slow. >But it will make the data unrecoverable even with expensive means. > > A good option for more speed would be to use aespipe to encrypt /dev/zero and write that output to the disk. Since AES encryption generates essentially random data, this should be the equivalent of reading from urandom, only much much faster. You still have to run it multiple times of course, and with a different encryption key each time, but commands like this should do the trick: head -c 45 /dev/urandom | uuencode -m - | head -n 2 | tail -n 1 > key.txt dd if=/dev/zero bs=64k | aespipe -p3 -e AES128 3/dev/hda -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list