Shredding a hardisk

Rothrandir

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I'm looking to put an old computer back into use, and would like to clean all the junk out of it and start fresh. Since I'll be re formating it anyway, I'd like to shred it and make it as clean as possible.

Most of the shredding software seems to aim primarily towards erasing selected files, rather than the entire system. I downloaded and tried to use one shredder, and now it's hung up with a flashing "_" in the top left corner of the screen. I'm not sure if it's working or not :shrug:

Does anyone know of something I can put onto a floppy or CDRom, and boot? I'm looking for freeware...
 

ausbump

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I think there's one called dan's boot and nuke
That does the whole lot.
 

Rothrandir

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3 replies in a matter of minutes, now that's service!

Thanks guys, I'll give the Ultimate boot CD a shot, as it has DBAN on it.
I'll let you know how it works out.

Any idea how long I might expect it to take? The hard drive is about a 60gig i think.

*edit* 4 replies...empath crept in while I was replying
 
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It's very easy to wipe the disk in Linux. You can download a bootable cd image, burn it to a CD, and boot it if you don't have access to a computer with it already installed. Once it's booted, open up a command line and figure out which drive it is. If it's the only drive in the system, and it's SATA, just type "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda". If it's the second drive, use /dev/sdb, third /dev/sdc and so on. If it's PATA(IDE) it would usually be /dev/hda, /dev/hdb, so on. One way to find out is to type "df -h", which will display the size of each disk in human-readable units (MB, GB, or TB...). Sometimes the main hard disk will be /dev/hdb if the CD-ROM for instance is the channel master device. This will change every bit on the device to zero, be very careful! I would recommend removing any other hard drives.

If you have any questions, ask me.
 

B@rt

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Nothing will beat the speed of this shredder rosie... ;) :p
electricshredderyv6.jpg
 

Rothrandir

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Bert, you must have missed the part where I said I was trying to put the computer back into service ;)
 

geepondy

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What if you don't want to wipe out the whole disk, only clear the free space so that deleted files can't be recovered?
 

z96Cobra

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If you are going to continue to use the computer yourself, and not give/sell it to someone else, why do you want to "shred" the drive? I would just fdisk it and then reformat and you won't have any problems. Just curious about the need to "shred" the drive.

Roger
 

WNG

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HDAT2 can do what you want and more.

But I also think it's probably unnecessary to go further than a full format.

There are a number of disk wiping freeware out there. Basically writes 1's to the whole disk.
 

light_emitting_dude

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Definately use a program that will write zeros to the disk. I believe Norton has a diskwipe utility. I have seen some freeware diskwipe utilities but they are unreliable and slow.

If your just going to use the computer for yourself, I would not worry about it. If you going to sell it, definately find a program that will zero out the disk.
 

Carpenter

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If you want to wipe it, make sure you get a program that can do multiple passes. Old data can be restored from a hard drive that has been fdisked and formatted. Even if a new OS is installed over top.

Look for something that can do 7 passes and mix up what it is writing on each pass. Not just all 0's or 1's.
 
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