Bill, On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 11:12 +0100, Bill Cumming wrote: > Best way is probavly just to use the "dd" command: > If you run off of a live CD then just point "dd" to the drive instead > of a file. > > Example: sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda > > That will overwrite the entire drive that's on /dev/sda with random > data destroying any Filesystem on that drive. > > You should at least do multiple alternating runs of > "/dev/zero" (quick) and "/dev/urandom" (slow)
Only one run is necessary unless you think the CIA or GCHQ are interested in the data. Even then the equipment required to recover anything costs millions of pounds. You may want read about 'The Great Zero Challenge'[1] where a disk overwritten with zeroes using dd and the challenge was to recover the data. It ran from Jan 15th 2008 until Jan 15th 2009. Nobody took up the challenge! Regards, Tony. [1] http://hostjury.com/blog/view/195/the-great-zero-challenge-remains-unaccepted -- Tony Arnold, Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6093 Head of IT Security, Fax: +44 (0) 705 344 3082 University of Manchester, Mob: +44 (0) 773 330 0039 Manchester M13 9PL. Email: tony.arn...@manchester.ac.uk -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
