Comments on: Cleaning the Slate

Question: Cleaning the Slate

Poolio — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 19:54:52 -0800

What's the best way to wipe a hard drive clean?

I've got an old Dell desktop model that I want to sell, but before I do I need to erase all of the data on the hard drive.

By: orthogonality

orthogonality — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:00:34 -0800

shred works, comes with cygwin, seems relatively paranoid, and is free.

By: special-k

special-k — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:02:21 -0800

here and here

via

By: SansPoint

SansPoint — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:03:37 -0800

Boot from a Linux floppy (LOAF (Linux on a Floppy) is good for this). Run this:



dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd0

This will write your hard drive with all zeroes. Done.

By: Poolio

Poolio — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:05:33 -0800

Thanks everyone.

Those links look really helpful, special-k.

By: Nelson

Nelson — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:09:25 -0800

dban is your solution. Make a floppy (or CD or USB drive), let it boot into Linux and wipe the disk. Done.

By: Poolio

Poolio — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:12:05 -0800

Thanks, Nelson. :)

By: special-k

special-k — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:13:36 -0800

You're welcome Poolio!

By: philomathoholic

philomathoholic — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:53:20 -0800

shred works, comes with cygwin, seems relatively paranoid, and is free.

The OP doesn't indicate which filesystem s/he is using, but NTFS, ext3 are both journaled file systems.

CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that the file system overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way to do things, but many modern file system designs do not satisfy this assumption. The following are examples of file systems on which shred is not effective, or is not guaranteed to be effective in all file system modes:

* log-structured or journaled file systems, such as those supplied with AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)
* file systems that write redundant data and carry on even if some writes fail, such as RAID-based file systems
...

-- via shred's man page

The man page goes on to say that it won't work with NFS, or compressed file systems either.

DBAN is the solution.

By: dws

dws — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:59:52 -0800

If the buyer expects to receive a bootable computer, dban et al. will require that you reinstall the operating system, so make sure you have the install CD available before you wipe the box.

By: Poolio

Poolio — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 21:02:22 -0800

Thanks for that bit of info, dws.

By: limon

limon — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:41:27 -0800

DBAN works, but I also like Active KillDisk which has a free version available (see link).

By: oaf

oaf — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 05:01:59 -0800

I think DBAN is pretty fantastic.