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)