Hello all,

I used the command shred -vfz -n 3 /dev/sda to wipe my drive. What commands do I use to verify that the drive is indeed wiped?

Appreciate anyone's assistance.

Thanks,
WN

That's pretty pointless, the OP has already wasted enough time.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hopefully you unmounted any filesystems that relied on /dev/sda or its partitions before the shred. If you had metadisks or LVM relied on /dev/sda or its partitions you need to verify that what is left (e.g. if RAID1 your /dev/sdb) is also shred'ed.

The man page for shred cautions that it doesn't work for journaled filesystems however, so long as the filesystems were unmounted before the shred and you did it on the device (/dev/sda) rather than the mounted filesystem this shouldn't be a concern.

What I do after shred'ding devices is just try to mount the filesystem. If that fails then it tends to confirm it was overwritten.

What syg00 advised would let you see what is at the beginning of the device. However, unless you knew what it was before you did the shred I'm not sure you would recognize if it had changed.

Note to bradvan: Shred has an option to specify a urandom device.

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I was just trying to give an alternative to destroy it. I wanted to give syg00 gave, but could not come up with hexdump.

Note the use of "-z", hence my suggestion. The output will be minimal.

In this case, you need to destroy all backups.