On Wednesday 11 Aug 2010 11:01:16 Byte Soup wrote: > One of my family wants to shred some HDDs before discarding them, or giving > them away on freecycle. What application would you all recommend to do > this? I have used "shred" to remove files, but I dont think it can do an > entire disc (i.e. some previously deleted files)
I use shred to dispose of drives every month. DBAN, as others have recommended, is handy. But you don't need it. You can boot on the disk you want to shred, or an Ubuntu Live CD (which has shred), or from a machine that has another boot disk and is cabled up to the target drive. Then shred the drive: shred -v /dev/sdb Yes, it works on drive devices. Yes, you can do it to a live drive, even one hosting the filesystem you booted from, and it will keep running. Very shortly after, the running system won't be good for much besides watching the output. -v will keep you informed of progress. It usually takes my server 48-72 hours to make 3-4 passes shredding a 500 GB SATA drive connected via a USB drive adaptor. I doubt anyone will have the resources or motivation to recover a drive after even 1 pass of shred, much less the higher numbers recommended by security researchers. Regards, Tyler -- "... jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you’re trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them." -- Noam Chomsky, in "Understanding Power" -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
