Hi folks,

I have several 40G hard drives which I'm prepared to dump. Before giving them to my friends what will be the easy way to securely erase all data on them.

I'm prepared performing following steps.

1)
attach the hard drives to a PC

2)
boot up the PC with a USB drive

3)
run:
$ fdisk -l | grep '^Disk'
$ fsck -f -y /dev/hdx1

x is the device number of the hard drive, such as a,b,c etc.

Can above steps permanently erase all data on the hard drive?


Just found;
Use an Ubuntu Live CD to Securely Wipe Your PC’s Hard Drive
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/15037...cs-hard-drive/

Can it work? TIA

B.R.
satimis

Yes, it can. In fact, a really fast and easy way is to use a PartedMagic CD, which has a clone of DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) on it. I suggest the clone rather than the original because I've had some problems with DBAN confusing USB ports with actual devices. PartedMagic runs in memory, and it will wipe the 40GB drive of an old machine in well under an hour.

fsck just chek/restore filesystem, it's not erase any data.

Already suggested DBAN should be just fine.

Assuming that your friends don't work for the NSA/CIA it is enough to simply overwrite the whole disk with zeroes.will do the job.

I have just enough paranoia to believe that---in principle--data can be recovered after just writing all zeros. If you have the same paranoia, use dd to first write random data, then all zeros.

It depends on your paranoia level. If you really want to be sure that no one can recover anything look into the shred program. The basic command is:
By default it will write random data over the entire surface of the drive 3x.

Be sure to remove power cables to any internal drives that you want to keep data on just in case.

A live cd or live usb is fine. Any of the tools that write to each bit a few times is the normal way to be secure. dd works if you do it a few times one's and zero's.

Dban is a common tool and used by many people.

I'm not convinced more than just covering with zeros is really needed, are there really programs out there capable of reading data overwritten with zeros?
If somebody who can do anything more exotic than run a few recovery programs on your drive gets hold of it then they're likely either too sophisticated to care about your data or they're already bugging you.

There are ways to recover data that is overwritten once with zeroes. If you have confidential data that a government will take the time and costs to recover them than you should use a hammer and one of the big magnets from a junk yard.
But the OP is stating that he wants to give the disks to friends, so anything more than a simple run of dd is overkill and pure paranoia (and may be to much self-esteem, if it was a normal desktop system no one wants your data).

"pure paranoia"-----yup, none of that watered-down stuff for me......

seriously--you are right. For most things, the simplest solution is fine.

If the disk has my personal identity data on it, then it does not matter who's getting the disk---it's going to get the full paranoia treatment.

so....the correct answer is "it depends"

If the personal info on your PC makes it worth while for a criminal to pay a data recovery company to get it back then you're rich enough to shred the drives and buy new ones for friends, family or whoever.
It's hard to phrase this but I would be surprised if anyone who has time to post here has data on their personal drive a criminal sophisticated enough to recover zero-overwritten would care about. Unless your name is Gates, Ellison or, possibly, Assange then zero-overwrite will be enough.

Again---you are right.

Think of it this way: I can do 2 passes with dd (one random, and the 2nd all zeros) faster than I can type an average post on LQ. Thus, an overkill of 5000% costs me nothing.......

Anticipating the likely nitpick, I'm talking about the time to enter the commands. I'll be sleeping while they run, so that does not count.

Fair enough, if you have the time then being careful isn't a bad thing.

Take the cover off the hard drive. Remove the hard drive disks. Put on a pair of safety glasses. Using two pairs of pliers hold a disc on both sides with pliers in each hand. Break the disc(s) using a back and forth motion. Guaraneteed NOBODY is gonna be able to do anything with that. And you can save the high powered neodimium magnets with which to do neat things.

A hammer.