I need to wipe data clean off some servers -- best method?

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WaLieN

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I was planning on just running this tool: http://www.dban.org/

Is there a better way of doing this? Also, which method would you suggest? I have a window of about two days to work on this. Will a Gdisk be able to clear out a few hard drives within that time span? Thanks in advance!
 
Looks good to me. All these utilities do is write zeros to all the sectors on the disk. Any one of them should get the job done. I've seen a lot of hoopla about Recuva because it does this and more and is free.
 
I take the drives out and put them in a drill press. They don't like to work when they have several holes through the platters.

Are these being wiped for re-purposing/sale or for recycling?
 
They all work the same, writing random data, writing all 0s is actually not secure. But really its not that big a deal, just write something.

Not sure if dban will erase many drives at once, I last used it like a bajillion years ago. You can also boot off a Ubuntu Live CD and run shred on all your disks, it does the saem thing, but it makes it easier to shred many disks at once. You can open up a few consoles and shred a drive in each.

All it is is 'shred /dev/hda' or whatever your drive is, u can check its command line options too.
 
that depends on how securly you need to wipe the drives. If it's nothing to uber secure than a DOD/DOJ wipe method with dban should be suffcient (0, 1, random pattern) and it does support wiping multiple drives. (not sure on raid controller support though.) Also if the drives are not marked which slot they belong in mix the drives up as well. But if you need to securely destroy the data then only solution is one of 3.

1. Dban + Physical Destruction
2. Physical Destruction
3. Dban+Degaussing+Physical Destruction
 
Last version of DBAN I used could wipe multiple drives at once. It was very painful.
 
brom42 said:
I take the drives out and put them in a drill press. They don't like to work when they have several holes through the platters.

Are these being wiped for re-purposing/sale or for recycling?
Click to expand...
They will be sold off.

drgnfang said:
Last version of DBAN I used could wipe multiple drives at once. It was very painful.
Click to expand...
Why was it very painful?

edit: Also, some of these will be done on a Dell Poweredge. The firm is unsure whether or not they have a raid system implemented. If they do, I'm guessing it's some sort of Perc card -- will Darik work with other controllers?
 
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After doing some research, it looks like dban does not support some SCSI/SAS controllers (Dell Perc 6/i in this case). I will have to look into another solution.
 
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Boot into ubuntu livecd and do a simple:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<device here> bs=1m

Replace the <device here> with sda or sdb. I recommend disconnecting any disk prior to wiping, so that only the good disk can be wiped.

If you want slower random wipe (more secure) then try:
sudo if=/dev/random of=/dev/<device here> bs=1m
 
Use shred or wipe after booting a Linux CD. I like Finnix, it's small and fast, wipe is included.

I would not just zero them if they're going to be resold, especially if they've been used for business purposes.
 
Then you write random junk first and after that zero-write it. All but the most paranoid people would be safe. If the data is so critical (company secrets) then i would physically destroy the storage medium - to be absolutely sure no recovery will ever happen.

Normally, companies have guidelines that tell at least two/three employees must be present during the destruction. Having clear guidelines which are adhered to will reduce leaking sensitive information to a minimum.
 
sub.mesa said:
Boot into ubuntu livecd and do a simple:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<device here> bs=1m

Replace the <device here> with sda or sdb. I recommend disconnecting any disk prior to wiping, so that only the good disk can be wiped.

If you want slower random wipe (more secure) then try:
sudo if=/dev/random of=/dev/<device here> bs=1m
Click to expand...

What is the difference between this and shred?
 
WaLieN said:
Why was it very painful?
Click to expand...
Two 20g IDE drives doing a secure wipe (one step above the DoD standard if I remember correctly) took the better part of three days. They were on the same IDE channel and it was saturated.
 
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