[PLUG] Scrubbing hard drive

Jason Barnett jason.barnett71 at gmail.com
Fri Apr 30 22:20:11 UTC 2021


Not answering your question, but my preferred method of scrubbing a drive
is to either use DBAN (dban.org) or just write /dev/urandom to the block
device ( dd if=/dev/urandom  of=/dev/sda ).  This writes random garbage
over the entire drive including partition tables and all data. The data
MIGHT me recoverable if someone wanted to spend a lot of money to do so,
but for all reasonable purposes it is wiped.  Using DBAN will be more
secure, but take a lot longer.  Either method may take a day or so to
complete, depending on the size and speed of the drive.

Jason

On Fri, Apr 30, 2021 at 3:10 PM Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com>
wrote:

> Prior to taking an old Sony Vaio laptop for recycling I wanted to scrub the
> hard drive.
>
> First I used cfdisk and deleted each of the three partitions, wrote the
> changes, then quit. For some reason this didn't work. Tried again, same
> result. I'd like to understand why.
>
> What did work was running 'rm -rf --no-preserve-root /'.
>
> Rich
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