[PLUG] Disk Wipe on Linux

AthlonRob athlonrob at axpr.net
Thu Apr 21 04:49:12 UTC 2005


Paul Johnson wrote:
> On Wednesday April 20 2005 11:34 am, Richard C. Steffens wrote:
> 
>>Some years ago I bought a program from Symantec for wiping hard
>>drives, with options to do a simple erase, or a process whereby
>>several patterns are written and erased over the whole disk.
>>
>>What is the Linux equivalent of this?
> 
> 
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[hs]d??

I've always used /dev/urandom, myself... I would think random data being 
written all over the disk would be more effective than zeros.

I did, some time ago, want to create a /dev/one so I could do a 
/dev/zero, /dev/one, then /dev/urandom a few times to shake things up, 
but never got it off the ground (I think it was before I left for BMT) 
and haven't gotten interested in it since.  :-)

Rob



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