Hello,

I have 3 cpus with hard drives that I need to wipe clean- no reinstalls. What I want, is a floppy or cd that I can boot into and that has a utility that will format the drives in say, fat32 or ext3. Second thought, I don't even need a file system installed, just all data wiped CLEAN. Can anyone suggest a way to do this tidy on one disk? I don't have any utilities with me (ubuntu install cd or winxp disk), so I will have to be able to download the tools from the Net.

Many Thanks,

ab

Download Knoppix Live CD.

At the boot: prompt, type knoppix 1 (this will load you to single user mode -- console only, no gui). Then type fdisk -l (that's L) to see what the drive is named that you want to secure delete.

Then type shred -v -z -n 10 /dev/hda. Of course, change /dev/hda to whatever your disk is called. This will secure wipe your disk. The -v means verbose. -z means finish with an additional write of the entire disk with 0's (i.e. it will look like a brand spanking new drive). The -n 10 will wipe your disk 10 times before the zero wipe. If you leave off -n 10, it will default to 25 times, which is a bit overkill.

The shred utility is great for securely deleting everything from the disk. It's US Department of Defense quality, used for wiping computer disks.

thanks for the reply. I'll have to download and the burn the knoppix live cd using a winxp machine. Is this an iso? If it is, I'll have problems burning it.

Thanks Again,

ab

Yes it's an iso, but why will you have problems burning it? You can download CDBurnerXP Pro or ISO Recorder v2 for free and burn iso's from Windows.

Also, if your Ubuntu disk is also a live CD, it might have shred on it. Just boot it up into Live mode and then do which shred.

pljvaldez, thanks for posting that, I have been looking for that as well.

Thanks for the tip on ISORecorder. Unfortunately It'll take quite awhile to download the Knoppix live cd, even via dsl (at work and need to do this soon). Is there anything bare bones that would be a quicker download?

Thanks Again,

ab

Hi,

I actually just found this: "Derik's Boot and Nuke" (http://dban.sourceforge.net/). Claims to be DOD quality.

-ab

I just tried the Knoppix thing. Unfortunately, I had a problem. I typed knoppix1 at the boot screen, but it said that it couldn't find a boot kernel called knoppix1. Then I tried fdisk-l, and got the same message (except it said there was no boot kernel called fdisk). What is wrong? Should I try in a terminal? And what is the password for the live knoppix root terminal?

Yes, but I’m sure there are several floppy linux-based rescue disks which contain the shred utility (somewhere on the net).

Just press enter at the boot prompt (alternatively, type “knoppix”). IIRC, there is no password (use sudo). If you want to boot straight to a root shell, type “knoppix 3” at the boot prompt (3 for third runlevel).

You forgot to put a space between "knoppix" and "1" and also between "fdisk" and "-l"...

BTW, shred used to also be used for shredding individual files within a running OS, but don't use it that way any more. Most filesystems now have journals and by shredding a file, you're just shredding the journal entry, not the actual file area on the disk.

Is it possible to do this to a USB drive? Or does it work differently?

You could hop on over to madtux or OSdisc and purchase a bootible cd at a reasonable price.

Doesn't make sense to me to download an entire OS just to format a hard drive, thats a big download.

I'd recommend the Gparted Live CD. Takes about 10min to download and burn. Boot it, and format in almost any file extension imaginable.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

IGF