[oclug] How do I nuke the contents of my hard drive?

[Vic Gedris]

On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, Johnathan Hicks wrote:

> I'm going to be sending my Linux hard drive back to Fujitsu for RMA tomorrow
> morning (Friday), and thought that it might be wise to erase the contents of
> the drive before I do. This is still possible because the drive hasn't had a
> catastrophic failure yet. In fact, the drive apparantly stopped misbehaving
> just after I recieved my RMA #. ;-)
> Are there any recommendations on how to nuke the contents and what to use to
> do it?
> Thanks.

Funny...I'll be sending back a Fujitsu drive tomorrow too. :)

When you say you want to "nuke" the drive, how much nuking do you want
to do?  If you want to quickly erase its contest, you can just format
the partitions (mkfs /dev/hd??) and then use fdisk to erase the
partitions themselves.

If you want to be extra careful so that nobody can recover any data,
you'll want to do a bit more than that.....like do something to write
random junk to the entire hard drive, several times.  If not sure
exactly how you would do that in Linux, however...

Cheers,
Vic

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