Erasin Hdds...

Lman

Okay so as far as I can tell Darik's B & N is about the best way to totally erase a hard drive beyond recovery. I have a lot of hard drives to erase before I sell them. I have a setup to where I can mount all my IDE/SATA drives through USB for when I do recovery jobs. I'm just wondering though, would it work if I were physically unmount my laptop hard drive and plug another one into the USB port and then run Dariks?

woboyle

Best means in Linux to totally erase an HDD? Try the command "dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/drive-id" where drive-id is the root drive /dev name, such as /dev/sdb. That will copy null (0) bytes to every bit of the disc. If you want to make it unreadable, in forensic terms, then you need to write it with 0 bytes (no bits set), FF bytes (all bits set), F0 bytes (top 4 bits set), and 0F bytes (bottom 4 bits set). And finally, another run with 0 bits set. For most purposes, that will erase the disc to where nothing will be recoverable. NSA secure erasure processes specify (I think) about 7 complete wipes of the disc. This just uses 5... :-)