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@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:
- save a megabyte of /dev/urandom in a file
- 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)