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Old 12-14-2014, 03:52 PM   #1
jrickards
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Wipe account


I am the only user on my Bodhi linux laptop. I am getting a new laptop and want to offer this one for local sale or trade. However, I want to wipe my current account so that the new owner doesn't have access to my personal data (music files I'm not so concerned about, logins to websites, etc are the concern).

I'm not sure how to do this.
 
Old 12-14-2014, 04:16 PM   #2
yooy
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If you want to wipe all data you may prepare usb bootable distro and use it with command that will fill your disk with random numbers. This may look something like
Quote:
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX bs=4096
Use it with care and at own risk. Note that it may take long time.
 
Old 12-14-2014, 04:30 PM   #3
jlinkels
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Quote:
Originally Posted by yooy View Post
If you want to wipe all data you may prepare usb bootable distro and use it with command that will fill your disk with random numbers. This may look something like

Use it with care and at own risk. Note that it may take long time.
Better is to use /dev/zero and BS=100M
/dev/zero is much faster and overwriting with zeros is exactly as secure as random numbers. The 100MB blocksize speeds up the operation.

jlinkels
 
Old 12-14-2014, 05:34 PM   #4
jrickards
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You misunderstand (I think), I just want to create a clean my account/login/userdata, not wipe the disc.
 
Old 12-14-2014, 05:45 PM   #5
astrogeek
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To simply remove the user account, as root use
Code:
man userdel (to see other options and usage info)

userdel -r username
I am not familiar with Bodhi, so if it uses a 'Buntu-like sudo instead of an actual root user you should probably first create a new dummy user for them to be able to login with, again as root or sudo...

Code:
[sudo] useradd -m [other options] newuser
[sudo] passwd newuser
... where other options depend on your needs, see man useradd. The -m will cause it to create the new /home/newuser directory.

The userdel command above will remove the original user's home directory and mail files, but you will have to search for other files owned by this user, if any, to delete them.

If you do not have anything really sensitive this should be sufficient. If worried about sensitive stuff on the disk then dd as recommended by others and reinstall.

Last edited by astrogeek; 12-14-2014 at 05:54 PM.
 
  


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