Need to wipe clean a hard drive
 

Hi

I know someone with some old Macs who is willing to pass one on to me but only if I shred all the data (wipe the data) off the hard drive first. I don't just mean formating it either - government level wiping the 1's and 0's clean away / a proper shred. Does anyone know any programs I could use / is there a linux distro boot-cd that could do it?
Of course, as they're macs, it'd need to be ppc architecture.


(And one other thing, could anyone with a bit of experience with Macs give me a ballpark figure of how many MBs the hard drive & Mhz the processor of a computer running MacOS 9.2 is likely to have ?)


Thanks

Any live linux CD for PPC will do. Then you can just dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda or whatever, I think.

I think Knoppix has a PPC version available. Search "knoppix ppc" on google.

Would GParted do? If you reformat a drive (correct me if I'm wrong), and then put a file on the drive, it erases all temp files kept from the old file.

I wonder if cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda would cause hardware malfuction.... hhhmmmm something to try when a old drive *evil grin*

it's shr... shr... shr...shredding time!!
 

Darik's Boot & Nuke

or

take your pick.

By working at block device level you bypass journaling filesystems too. So a "government level shred" is really overkill if you use dd. Three times with random bits should be more than enough.

you should wipe at leats 64 times with random binary otehrwise the data is still recoverable (at block level as all goverment forensic examanation tools work at)

Before journaling filesystems the DoD standard was three times.

I've never used the 'dd' command before though...
Could you give me an idea of how this command would look, Crito?

Thanks

There's a how-to right here on this very site:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...ything_With_DD

Above also mentions dcfldd written by Nicholas Harbour, who at the time was working for the Department of Defense Computer Forensics Lab (DCFL):
http://dcfldd.sourceforge.net/