The message <a59829110810031037s54dfde38k7a82482a133162dc@mail.gmail.com> from "Srdjan Todorovic" <todorovic.s@googlemail.com> contains these words:
2008/10/3 Anthony Anson <tony.anson@zetnet.co.uk>:
The message <48E62FAD.9080704@tiscali.co.uk> from Barrys linux mail <bazubuntumail@tiscali.co.uk> contains these words:
Lifted from a post in one of the Zetnet newsgroups:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
Which is OK if you want to nuke everything on the disk (or partition of you give it a partition number). But if you want to shred specific files... it won't do unless you call dd on each file (adjusting bs and count to match filesize).
I gathered that the idea was to nuke everything, BICHBW.
but from the point of view of getting rid of data, it'd be better to run
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda
Which is extremely slow (at least here...)
Ah, the joys of a 286!
[srdjant@tigerclaw ~]$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null bs=1M count=10 10+0 records in 10+0 records out 10485760 bytes (10 MB) copied, 2.50551 s, 4.2 MB/s
/dev/zero is much faster. You could do one pass of dding from /dev/zero, and then several passes of urandom (if you were that paranoid).
Yes, this is what I was going to do - with the paranoid bit added in. I'm putting a 'new' box together and I have a number of large (well, larger than most of the ones in this box) secondhand drives which I want to incorporate (fiver each from a local pootershop). You never know what might be on them innit. -- Tony http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hi-fi/