Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2007 11:27 am Post subject: overwriting hard drive
Does anyone know an easy, fast secure and FREE tool to overwrite my hard drive ?
I need to send it back to samsung, and I dont want that anybody recovers my datas easily.
im guessing you have another hard disk that boots up the os, or otherwise, its impossible to erase the entire disk that is used for os boot.
but even if that is so, from top of my head, burn a knoppix linux, boot it off from that cd, and use 'shred' command and erase any hard disk even the one that has windows on it, since that is not used to boot up anymore, which will totally destroy the content of disk by overwriting the disk with 0's over and over.
yup hid is correct , even with a strong electromagnet they can read it but before you get too paaranoia it costs alot and maybe germany has laws protecting your privacy ?
unless you have childpron or plans to make a dirty bomb on it i wouldnt be worried .
the price to recover a damaged disk is really high and the amount of disks they need to repair is so big they usually dont bother . its not because they can do it for criminal investigation they set it as a standard
in the years i worked for a computershop i have encountered more then once that we could recover nakid pics of the owners wife/girlfriend but thats only because we where bastards with way to much time on our hands ( meh its an hobby )
even after a diskkeeper format we couldnt recover a single thing and we had to send it out to specialised companies . if you use hids suggestion you should be clear for 99% of all recovery actions they could come up with
if u boot from knoppix, u probably end up with graphical interface unless u boot it into console mode with boot up option, but thats ur choice, but i prefer console mode, since it boots up much faster than going full kde for no reason.
then, type
Code:
dmesg | grep hd
you should use 'sd' in place of 'hd' if its a SATA drive.
and make sure the hard drive u're trying to wipe is listed. i'd say pull the plug of the drive that you're keeping before booting up, so any crazy aftermath won't happen by choosing the wrong drive to erase...-_-
figure out which drive (eg, /dev/hda or /dev/sda or some such) is the disk to erase. you can use 'cfdisk /dev/hda' and check out the partition scheme. Then type
Code:
man shred
(or just type this in google)
for any last minute info, and i suggest u go
Code:
shred -n 5 -v /dev/hda
(must specify the disk u're trying to erase)
so, it overwrites the disk 5 times instead of default's 25 times, which can take a very long time if the disk is huge, unless u wanna run it throughout the night just to be paranoid... when thats done, even fbi should have difficulty reading any of it...
(just a wrong part on me but shred writes random bits on the disk not 0's)
dam tank you should see the stuff we come across people's comps that they thought they deleted... quite fun to be honest
we got a collection going... most of them are pretty hott 2 =)
_________________
--So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.
-f, --force
change permissions to allow writing if necessary
u could check the man page while rolling eyes...
or i rather guess that knoppix starts out with a regular user and not root, so, try becoming root with 'su -' or 'sudo su -' command first, then you will certainly have writing rights...
'su -' turns u into root totally including most of the environemental variable to be sure that nothing is inherited from casual user's. yes, knoppix must have a clean environement since its a cd boot, but for the sake of custom, i do 'su -' whenever i go to root. and thats not the point to fix his prob either...
also some system won't allow direct 'su' command, since root users don't have a password set, notably ubuntu is built this way. but last time i checked, knoppix probably allowed direct 'su' for easy maintenance.
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( meh its an hobby 
)
