[PLUG] Disk wiping utility?

[Matt McKenzie]

>
> kurt braget wrote:
> > I'm running out of memory on my laptop, which is partitioned with
> openSUSE
> > 10.3 and Windows. What I'd like to do is wipe the drive and do a clean
> > install of openSUSE 10.3 so I can use the whole hard drive. I don't even
> use
> > Windows on this machine, and I want to experiment with formatting the
> entire
> > hard drive. Anybody know of a good utility I could use to do this? Any
> > warnings? Thanks.
> > _______________________________________________
>

Well you could just use the disk partitioning tools during the SuSE
installer, and just repartition and wipe the drive.
If you don't care about the old data possibly being retrieved later (i.e.
it's just you using the machine), this should be sufficient.

If you want to be more thorough, you could use a DoD type tool.
My favorite, useful when customers want their drive wiped, is Boot & Nuke,
which is on the UltimateBootCD (ultimatebootcd.com).
It is a mini Linux distro itself, and is text based menu driven, it is
capable of DoD level hard drive wipes, with random or NULL data, multiple
passes, etc.  Basically just select the level of wipe, and fire 'n forget.



-- 
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Matt M.
LinuxKnight