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Wiping a drive

Author: Hertie
Date: 07-04-04 18:25

Hi

A have a drive which I need to wipe clean for *some reason*... ;) In other words I need the whole disk to be overwritten with bogus data.

I tried bcwipe from the ports but this is an old version which does not support wiping whol drives instead of files (there are no files left on the drive thanks to a neurotic roomie) and the current source of the project won't compile on my system.

Now I heard, that good ol' dd could do the trick if feed with reandom strings/numbers/bytes. Did anybody ever do this before? How would I do this?

cheers mateys

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Re: Wiping a drive

Author: Rob McLeod
Date: 08-04-04 13:31

I haven't ever tried this, and I'm not going to since I don't have any disks that I *want* to lose the data. :)

As root:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/ad0s1a

should do the trick. Of course substitute the 'of' attribute with the mount point of your choice.

I'm not entirely sure what will happen when the disk fills up. You may need to use the 'bs' flag. man dd for the syntax.

For an added dose of paranoia, run this command a few times.

Good luck with the feds! :)

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Re: Wiping a drive

Author: el_kab0ng
Date: 16-04-04 05:05

www.killdisk.com

Boots from a floppy and totally 01's a disk. (might take awhile on larger disks)

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Re: Wiping a drive

Author: gm
Date: 18-03-05 11:22

The new BCWipe (www.bestcrypt.com) can wipe entire hard drives. You can select from 1 to 35 times.

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