Joshua Murphy wrote:
On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 6:36 PM, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote:
Mick wrote:
On Wednesday 16 December 2009 18:49:07 Grant wrote:
I'm about to sell my old laptop and I'd like to wipe out the data and
install any flavor of Linux via USB (the CD drive doesn't work any
more). I've got a bootable USB key that will get me into Gentoo. How
would you take it from there? I'm looking for something quick and
easy. My data isn't too sensitive, but I'd like to do some type of
wiping so it isn't all just sitting there with a deleted flag or
however that works.
First I'd mount the partitions and then emerge/use shred:
# shred -v -n 25 -z -u /mnt/a_partition
Then I would delete old partitions, create new partitions and format them
as required. If you're really paranoid about your data (which from what
you're telling me you're not) you can also use dd to randomly overwrite
partition tables, but I would probably not bother.
Now, there may be more modern tools to do all this with a single button,
but I haven't looked into it in any detail.
HTH.
Also note that shred, at least the last I read, doesn't work to well on some
file systems. I know this used to be true for reiserfs and some other
journalized file systems.
I'm thinking the dd thing may be the best way here. I don't think it cares
about file systems when it does its thing.
Dale
:-) :-)
That is, of course, when shredding individual files, where the final
location and initial locations for them may not wind up being the same
place on disk. When 'shredding' a whole partition, though, the file
system itself ceases to matter, as it in itself is being overwritten
as well as all the data it provides a means of indexing for.
Incidentally, I believe the oft referenced here DBAN uses shred
internally, last I looked.
That makes sense. So, the OP shouldn't mount the drives but shred the
disk itself?
Dale
:-) :-)
