I need to remove the Windows partion and other information left on it, and at the same time secure that no information is left (not restorable). How can I do that with using Knoppix? Currently my problem is that I cannot get access to remove any files on a ntfs partition, which is annyoing. I'm using the recent version of Knoppix (4.0) that has ntfs support for both read & write.



How do I proceed?

If you want to remove all the info from a partition, you don't need to unmount it. You can overwrite the whole of it (that's even more secure because the information about which file was where will be also removed). All you need is the partition name (like /dev/hda1). Find it out (you have probably already done it).

Then look if you have openssl installed. It has a nice option, rand, that produces random values. You can overwrite the whole partition this way. To learn more about it, run 'man rand'.

The command will be rather simple (but make sure you're using right partition name, because you'll remove everything!). It's something like
openssl rand -out /dev/hda1 100000
The last parameter is size (in bytes). You can test it with smaller one first to see if it works correctly (because it'll take some time when run on N GB).

Edit: if you want it really impossible to recover, repeat ten times or so.

unmount the partition and go
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hd<where windows lives> bs=2048
a couple of times...



Cheers,
Tink

well looks like the above poster's beat me to it.

nothing seems to happen when I do "dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hd<where windows lives> bs=2048"

Okay something must have happened since I can't mount the partition again (hooray). But I thought a extensive operation as overwriting 60GB should get the harddrive to work alot, there is no activity showing whatsoever either on the lights of the computer or the "top". Am I doing something wrong here?

I though random had the potential to block, hence you may not scrub the entire partition. Especially on repeated runs.
I've always considered urandom a better option for things like this.

urandom worked better, thanks!