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| Wiping disks | (2003/10/15 08:00) |
Destroying the data on a disk is a fairly complicated thing to do. Peter Guttman wrote a fairly comprehensive paper on this a few years ago in which he recommended 3 wipes with random data as being sufficient for modern IDE drives. If you agree with him, there's still the issue of how to go about this in a reasonable amount of time. Here's what I do: I use an OpenBSD boot floppy or boot CD and kick it into the shell when it prompts me. Then I use dd to write and /dev/arandom to overwrite the disk. dd if=/dev/arandom of=/dev/rwd0c bs=32768In my experiments, optimal speed was gained by specifying a block size of 32768. Other block sizes may work better with your drive. Do a couple of tests and figure out what's best for you. Hitting ctrl-T will give you status at any time Peter Guttman's paper on wiping disks |
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