On Mon April 25 2005 9:37 am, Randall R Schulz wrote:
Eric,
On Monday 25 April 2005 07:25, Baenen Eric P Contr AFRL/HEC wrote:
List members,
I'm running SUSE 9.2 Pro... can anyone recommend an app or technique for securely wiping the contents on an external usb hard drive with a single 120GB reiserfs partition?
...
- it's been suggested that I repeatedly do "dd i=/dev/urandom o=/dev/sda && dd i=/dev/zero o=/dev/sda" - and I will do this if necessary - but would rather not take the days that this is likely to take
If you want all the data on the disk eradicated, this will work. And unless you're data is so valuable that people are out there just waiting for the opportunity to apply extreme data recovery measures just to get some fragments of what used to be there, doing it once is sufficient. If the data really is that sensitive and that valuable, then do it twice.
But more importantly, nothing is going to be faster than this, except perhaps degaussing the unit. Besides, it's not going to take days. It would probably be done by now if you'd started the "dd" command when you sent this mail.
Another option is to run "wipe" which is probably similar to "shred". I'm pretty sure that you can wipe an entire file-system or disk (aka "wipe /dev/hda1". -Nick -- <<< Knock, knock, Neo. >>> /`-_ Nick LeRoy The Condor Project { }/ http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~nleroy http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor \ / nick.leroy@linuxmail.org The University of Wisconsin |_*_| 608-265-5761 Department of Computer Sciences