[CentOS] slightly OT: dban

Sat Aug 28 10:34:08 UTC 2010
Kevin Thorpe <kevin at pibenchmark.com>

  On 27/08/2010 15:48, Peter Kjellstrom wrote:
> On Friday 27 August 2010, Kevin Thorpe wrote:
>>    On 27/08/2010 15:19, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>>> I'm trying to nuke a Dell Optiplex GX620. I've got a perfectly good dban
>>> 1.0.4 that I've used a bunch of times... but on this machine, it says
>>> starting, then dies, saying "dban has finished with non-fatal errors.
>>> Check the log for more information" It never gets to the interactive
>>> menu.
>>>
>>> Now that I've disabled the non-existant floppy drive, at least it does
>>> say "to save the log file again, press enter"....
>> I usually use dban but if it's not handy use a liveCD (me usually
>> Ubuntu) and use dd:
>>
>> Assuming the drive to kill is /dev/sda:
>> dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda
> This command will take forever and ever and ever (reads against /dev/random
> blocks as the kernel runs out of entropy). /dev/urandom would be better but
> still not very fast.
>
> To get some speed you'd have to do something like:
>   1) save a megabyte of /dev/urandom in a file
>   2) while true ; do dd file to dev ; done
>
> Or run some dban-like program instead of dd.
Times I've done this I've just set it off and walked away. Speed was 
never a consideration.
didn't know about shred though... I'll try that next time (if there ever 
is one)