[CentOS] slightly OT: dban

Fri Aug 27 14:33:46 UTC 2010
Kevin Thorpe <kevin at pibenchmark.com>

  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

Do it a few times for good measure. At work we have a policy of 
physically destroying
drives which grates a little at times.