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zuberuber
Asked: 2012-10-27 07:07:18 +0800 CST

How to completely erase hard drive? [duplicate]

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Possible Duplicate:
How can I securely erase a USB hard drive?
How to delete file(s) in secure manner?

I am looking for software/script/whatever that can completely destroy data on hard drive. By destroy I mean beyond recovery(even with special software). Is there any way to do this? Thanks.

hard-drive

3 Answers

  1. The tool named wipe deletes data permanently on HDD. To install it using terminal

    sudo apt-get install wipe

    To wipe out all data within a whole HDD type in terminal.

    sudo wipe /dev/sdaX

    where X is your partition.

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  2. Would this be something you'd be looking for?

    sudo -i
shred -f -n 5 -z [Location of drive]

    If you want to make shred do more distortion-application, then bring up shred's help:

    shred --help

    or

    man shred
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  3. DBAN http://www.dban.org/ is commonly used for that purpose, it is an iso image which you burn to a CD (or other media), boot, and write random data over the disk multiple times (depending on settings).

    Somewhat similar to something like

    dd if=/dev/urandom of=#disk path#

    Though I presume DBAN might have more options and a nicer interface

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