On Sat, Apr 14, 2007 at 09:28:51AM -0700, centos@911networks.com wrote:
On Sat, 14 Apr 2007 11:20:16 -0500 (CDT) Barry Brimer lists@brimer.org wrote:
I have a dozen of drives, ranging from 10Gb to 200Gb. I want to wipe them clean before donating them. I have a IDE/SATA to USB converter that works. I can see the drives properly.
Depending on the filesystem on the drives, shred may be fine "man shred" can tell you more. You can also use "cat /dev/random > /dev/devicename" as well.
I have looked at shred before asking, and it said:
The following are examples of file systems on which shred is not effective, or is not guaranteed to be effective in all file system modes:
- log-structured or journaled file systems, such as those supplied
with AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)
That refers only to shreding files on those filesystems, not shreding the block devices.
So shred /dev/device doesn't care about the filesystem in it.
How secure is cat /dev/random > /dev/devicename ?
Unless you're willing to keep moving your mouse and/or typeing for a couple of days, I don't recomend that. :)
/dev/urandom is faster than random and doesn't block, but isn't that much faster. Also, it's a single pass, so I doubt it will be as safe as shred.