• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Recommend a Zero Fill Utility

A

ArbY

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 6, 2007
Messages
390
I'm selling my formerly main hard-drive and would like to make sure my files are unrecoverable when the drive changes hands. Can anyone recommend a zero fill utility or something similar for my purposes?

e: The drive in question is a WD 150GB VelociRaptor.
 
DBAN is the tried and true utility for this purpose, just download the image and burn a bootable CD. The best thing about DBAN over some other wipes is at the end it will run a verification (unless you turn it off) that will tell you whether or not the wipe was successful or not, if it passes you can be certain all sectors were overwritten, if it fails there was a problem (bad sectors or otherwise) that not many other wipes will inform you of, these can potentially mean small bits of info were left behind.
 
Red Falcon said:
Use a Linux boot CD and run dd in the terminal:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sd(to be wiped)
or
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd(to be wiped)

This is slow, but will make all data unrecoverable.
Click to expand...

Just a note on these. /dev/urandom can be much slower than /dev/zero but will make recovery much harder as well.
 
Red Falcon said:
Use a Linux boot CD and run dd in the terminal:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sd(to be wiped)
or
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd(to be wiped)

This is slow, but will make all data unrecoverable.
Click to expand...

Or combine both via shred -zn# /dev/sdX for # (3 default) pass random and a final 0's overwrite. See man shred for more options.
 
Let me edit this for the person below who wants to hypocritically seem like an angel in the midst of good people on the internets!

Or torrent a ( LEGALLY obtained demonstration) copy of Acronis Disk Cleaner if one exist, and if you like it please go and purchase it to support them. This is also shows that the BT network can be a good medium for legal software distribution due to the amount of politicians world wide trying to shut it down and cause us to pay absolutely atrocious additional expenses to ISP and software companies to cover the overhead of monopolistic bandwidth prices.
 
Last edited:
MrsOldMX said:
Are you fucking serious?
Click to expand...

No but irt sure got your "Fucking attention" lol!.They trial it from their site.

God what a mouth on you!

I said buy it! Let me see.... torrents can be used to obtain illegal copies of pirated software such as apparently you have. And I say apparently because you have made it visible through your half assed well thought out reply to the subject.. However there are a massive amount of sites that legally distribute copies of their trials, demos, and even free editions over the BT networks as a way to cut down on bandwidth cost and overhead. Apparently you do not recognize the true nature of what the tech is capable of. Im a big proponent of BT as i believe it would seriously cut the end cost of products signficantly if companies stopped having to shell out massive bandwidth cost to host their own download sites.

Is it any different that when you download an official world of warcraft patch? Oh I bet you didnt know that it was downloaded via the global bit torrent network.

Open office, Linux, BSD Distros, Openfiler, FreeNAS, etc.... the list goes on. Do you think they do not use BT?

http://torrentfreak.com/legal-torrents-games-music-and-software/

http://gigaom.com/video/ten-sites-for-free-and-legal-torrents/

http://askville.amazon.com/bittorrent-legal/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=9216586

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/bittorrent4.htm

I always download music and movies to support the small emerging artist and producers who freely distribute their work to gain attention. There are some great products for no cost on the torrent networks. Hence why I have 16tb of storage space on hand.

So yeah Im fucking serious. Put a complaint in the hat if you like.

Ciao!
 
Last edited:
I'm not shocked or need a chillpill or anything, if you guys dont like my answers report me or go fuck yourself, simple as that.
 
MrsOldMX said:
I'm not shocked or need a chillpill or anything, if you guys dont like my answers report me or go fuck yourself, simple as that.
Click to expand...

wow, real mature.

what was the point of your answer? what did it even mean? :confused:
 
Format the disk
Cipher /W
Wait forever...
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
 
Red Falcon said:
Use a Linux boot CD and run dd in the terminal:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sd(to be wiped)
or
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd(to be wiped)

This is slow, but will make all data unrecoverable.


This is also good.
Click to expand...

If you use

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd(to be wiped) bs=4M

it will work at the drive's speed.

You could also use a faster RNG implementation that does not completely rely on kernel entropy, i.e. frandom, which is good enough to wipe a disk.
 
Ranma_Sao said:
Format the disk
Cipher /W
Wait forever...
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Click to expand...

Why would you resurrect this thread to say that? :confused:
The thread was over a month old.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd(to be wiped) bs=4M
Click to expand...
That will also work, thanks for the addition.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top