Siduction Forum
Siduction Forum => Free Speech => Topic started by: KrunchTime on 2015/08/16, 04:18:53
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I am trying to securely erase a 700+GB HDD on one of my laptops. I tried using:
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda
but that was still going after 34+ hours, with no status. Just for info, the dd command does not provide a status. So, I did a bit of research and discovered the pipe view (pv) command. Following is the command I am currently using to securely erase the referenced HDD:
cat /dev/zero | pv -brt | dd of=/dev/sda bs=1048576
The above command fills my hard drive (sda) with zeroes, providing a progress status while doing so. If you know the exact size of your HDD, you can display a progress bar using the pipe view command:
cat /dev/zero | pv -brtp -s ##g | dd of=/dev/sda bs=1048576
where ## is the size of the HDD in gigabytes.
Sources consulted:
Dd - Destroyer of Disks (http://www.noah.org/wiki/Dd_-_Destroyer_of_Disks)
Checking the Progress of dd (see comments) (http://blog.christophersmart.com/2009/11/28/checking-the-progress-of-dd/comment-page-1/)
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If you want to be sure, there is nothing to recover with any means, you should run the process at least twice. People with the habbit of wearing tin foil hats do it more often. Another method is using urandom, which is even slower :)
greetz
devil
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I haven't researched it myself, but according to the first link I provided as a consulted source, the blogger felt that wiping with zeroes was secure enough for most users. I agreed with what he said. My really personal stuff was under a TrueCrypt partition, so even if someone is able to undo the writing of zeroes over the whole drive, they then need to know that the TrueCrypt partition existed and the correct passphrase to open it.