DOD Level Drive Eraser
 

Can someone point me in the right direction for a utility that will erase hdd's to DOD specification. I have a client that wants me to make sure that his data has been erased from the hdd.

I have used:

http://www.dban.org/

or

Any suggestions?

I remember back when "DOD drive eraser" meant breaking the mag disk platters apart with a hammer.

PS:
Similarly, a "DOD tape erase" was shredding the tape reel with a pair of scissors ;-)

There was a distro just for this and it went onto a USB stick. Basically it was a minimal install with 'wipe' on it; 'wipe' was just run on the raw device (/dev/whatever) so you plugged in the USB stick, selected 'yes', and left the laptop running over the weekend. As already discussed in previous threads, multiple runs of 'dd' with a good pseudo-random number generator would run faster and probably give the same results (you need to look into the actual requirements to see).

I prefer shred. My typical command for this is "shred -v -z -n 10 /dev/hdx". It takes a while, but it is very clean when you are done.

gentlemen as always many thanks

What was wrong with dban? From memory it had options to shred to DOD and NSA levels.