[ILUG] wiping a faulty hard disk

[Keith Halligan]

If you can get the disk to be detected I'd give the following program
a go, it'll completly wipe the disk clean, doing 6 or 7 passes of
writing ones and zeros to the disk, making it practically impossible
to recover any data on the disk.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

There's another utility called "killdisk" that I've used in the past,
but I think it's only shareware.

Of course I'd check that using these types of utilities don't void any
warantee with the disk manufacturer.

Cheers,
- Keith

On 8/9/07, Karl O'Dwyer <jesusphonehome at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Patrick,
>
> I can understand the need to remove any readable data off a hard disc,  the
> need to ensure nothing can be recovered from the disc along with the need to
> ensure that you don't void the warranty is a tricky one,
>
> now this sorta old school unix, but put the discs into a spare machine and
> using a live distro of your choice,
>
> start a terminal and as root
>
> dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda (change /dev/hda to what ever the hard disk
> is)
>
> is will take a while, day or two if your lucky, it writes over the hard disk
> with pseudorandom data.
>
> that will make the data pretty irrecoverable, but i provide no warranty with
> this information, use it at your own discretion
>
> oh for added security make sure that the outside of the disk or its postal
> packaging has no indication that it came from your company , that reduces
> the likelihood of it being nicked
>
> -Karl
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