[SATLUG] Cleaning Harddrives

[Bruce Dubbs]

Chuck wrote:

>Glenn,
>
>Why not just wipe it the same way you wipe a CD-RW or DVD-RW???  It
>writes all zeros to the optical drive.
>
>That's when I thought about using it for a hard drive.  Worked there
>too.  If I remember right, I used "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda".  Took a
>little while for the 60Gig drive I wiped, but not a lot.
>  
>
/dev/random is probably better than /dev/zero.

>I did it a second time on the same drive to clean off the MBR, and
>that's an easy one -- "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda ct=1 bs=512"  or use
>1024 in the block size to be sure you get everything in the MBR.
>
>Oh -- I used Knoppix to boot up without touching the drive, then ran the
>wipes on the drive.  Quite honestly, I never went back with a sector
>reading utility to be sure it did write zeros on the whole drive.  But
>I'm pretty sure it worked.  It sure does work for CD-RWs and DVD-RWs.
>  
>
Using Tom's Root/Boot disk would probably be a faster boot than Knoppix.

http://www.toms.net/rb/tomsrtbt.FAQ

  -- Bruce