Recommendation for a Disk wipe utility!

**freeballer** · 12-24-2003, 08:32 PM

I'm looking for a disk wipping utility similar to "Darik's Boot and Nuke" or dban (http://dban.sourceforge.net/) so that I could boot into CLI and totally wipe the HD clean including MBR and partition table with DOD/Gutmann standard.
Is there a util for linux that can do that?

**eadz** · 12-24-2003, 09:13 PM

Try 'wipe'

**bitey** · 12-25-2003, 12:55 PM

If you need something extreme, each hard disk manufacturer provides a downloadable utility that will do the job. Do not be tempted to use the "low level format" option in your BIOS; this will likely ruin the drive by trashing the bad-sector table.

**windos_no_thanks** · 12-25-2003, 04:21 PM

Originally Posted by eadz

Try 'wipe'

"wipe" works on top of the filesystem, and the man page has this warning:

"Wiping over NFS or over a journalling filesystem (ReiserFS etc.) will most probably not work."

So don't use it with ReiserFS, ext3, xfs or jfs.

Something like this should work (when you have booted from the CD) without
any additional tools, although it might be a bit slow:

Code:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda

Running it several times is recommended, the result is also dependent on how much entropy
is available so using the keyboard while it is running should theoretically improve the result.

Oops, didn't notice wipe also works directly on block devices with -k flag, never mind...