castrends.blogg.se

NOTE: The drive is frozen, it supports Enhanced Security Erasing,Īnd the estimated completion time is 50 minutes. NOTE: For this example, we will be using /dev/sda.Ĭheck to see if the drive is frozen: hdparm -I /dev/sda However the Fedora 17 LiveCD DOES NOT, so your mileage will vary.Īttach the drive(s) to be erased and boot the computer up from the Linux LiveCD, and get to a root shell.Īll commands from now on will be issued as root.įind the name of the drive(s) that you want to wipe How to Issue the Secure Erase Commandĭownload and burn a Linux LiveCD that includes the hdparm utility. Then Advanced: Erasing SATA Drives by using the Linux hdparm Utility. To install GParted Live on your USB flash drive.

download and install Unetbootin on your MS Windows computer. Google "PArted MAgic" (not sure but you might have to pay for that now).

There are a lot of ways to issue this command. Your drive already has the in-built ability to permanently wipe all data: ATA Secure Erase. Take a long time, and waste CPU cycles and energy.

It doesn't destroy the drive, but it does cause unnecessary wear, And if you indeed face adversaries which are able and willing to invest that many resources into restoring data from your hard drive, then 3 overwrites with random data ("dodshort") should suffice to foil their dastardly plan of villainy. Which is far too impractical and unreliable for anyone who doesn't expect to find some very important data on your drive (matter of national security, millions of bitcoins, etc). For example, if you believe that someone might go so far as to disassembles your drive in a lab and examine it with an electron microscope cell-by-cell. More overwrites are only required to foil forensic methods which go for the hardware. That is all that is needed to make sure that no data can be restored via software methods. For most scenarios, a single overwrite with zeroes ("quick" mode) is more than enough. This kind of abuse is not how drives are usually used and can reduce the lifetime of the disk considerably.Īnd you probably don't need to do that anyway. For example, the " gutmann" mode will do 35(!) overwrites of every single bit. However, some of the more overzealous erasure modes of DBAN overwrite every single bit on the drive multiple times with multiple different values. By design DBAN is supposed to destroy the data, not the drive.