HDD wiping before selling as used?

D

Deusfaux

Gawd
Joined
Apr 11, 2006
Messages
756
I remember doing this before when I last upgraded but don't remember what I used to do it.

Something on the g-parted disc or something?

I have a pair of SATA Raptors I need to wipe - and I'd like to do it a little bit better than simply reformatting them.

Ideally, if I don't have to burn a CD, that'd be nice too. I dunno if anything can launch from a thumbdrive...

I don't mind burning a CD if necessary, though.

I'm also a little safer in that they were used in a RAID 0 setup, right? Like, all the data is split across both units...
 
you are thinking of the government approve 7 whipe crap... cant recall the name, starts with a D i think...

goes over the drive 7 times writing randomly and stuff.
 
Eraser, or dban as mentioned (Eraser uses dban for the actual "erasing" part anyway, so...).
 
dban seems to not give you a choice of which drives to erase? the documentation refers to every function as erasing ALL drives?

should i just be extra careful and disconnect my current working drives before running it?
 
If you want to be sure, yes i would do that?

disconnect and only have the drive you want, but it may take some time, so if you got some sare rig, maybe do it on tha rig so you can use your main rig...
 
Why are you so worried? As I suggested earlier, writing 0s across the entire drive should be perfectly sufficient. While it's possible to a degree to recover data after a drive has been 0ed out (extremely DIFFICULT and time consuming, however), it's a very expensive, professional level job at that point.
 
You can overwrite with semi-random data under linux:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda bs=1024k

Or zero:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024k

You have to be certain that /dev/hda is your disk. If its sata it would be something like /dev/sda or something... you can use dmesg to check the boot strings or look in /proc to make certain you aren't wiping the wrong drive... or just unhook all of your drives..


BTW, you don't want to use /dev/random as most linux distros actually gather entropy from things like your nic, your mouse, and the keyboard interrupts to fill this random pool so it is of high quality random data. If you suck it dry, it will block on read until you supply more data by I.E. moving the mouse... the urandom pool is infinite as it is a pseudo random number...

You can use a linux recovery disk to do this if you don't have linux installed.
 
I work for a US Gov agency and we also use DBAN when need to nuke a drive.

Its worth repeating, don't have any drive connected up that that you value the data on when DBAN runs.
 
The whole point of DBAN is to be a fire-and-forget type of solution. Just have some old junker board sitting around, connect your old drives to it, boot into DBAN, check back weeks later, done!

errm .., last step: Profit!
 
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