Knoppix Features - File Shredder

[Vale]

Greetings

I have a project coming up that is going to require me to erase several hard drives on some legacy systems before they are retired. The erase needs to be complete, preferably to DOD standards.

I’ve used Knoppix in the past to recover data on a blown HDD but does it have the ability to shred files built in?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. =^_^=

[firebyrd10]

even if you can't I've ehard of hardrive shredders that can be booted off a floppy and can shred to DOD standards and beyond.

[ViPERPHiSH]

Wouldn't

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd*

work? (well, replace 'hd*' with a valid hard drive, of coure ;-D.)

I'm sure you could find appropriate values of bs based on your hard drive. The default is 512 B, I think... but it seems to me that that would effectively nuke the whole thing if you just let it grind for a while... The other method is to use a big freaking magnet

Cheers,
<ViPER'PHiSH><

[Rootman]

Greetings

I have a project coming up that is going to require me to erase several hard drives on some legacy systems before they are retired. The erase needs to be complete, preferably to DOD standards.

I’ve used Knoppix in the past to recover data on a blown HDD but does it have the ability to shred files built in?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. =^_^=

I had the same situation. I wanted it to be simple and fast. I used a DOS diskwipe tool from the DiskCleanup package availiable at: http://www.gregorybraun.com/CleanUp.html . I also used gdisk from Symantec Ghost.

I prepped a Win 98 bootdisk and wrote an autoexec.bat batch file like so:

@echo off
gdisk 1 /mbr /wipe /y
gdisk 1 /cre /pri /for /q /v:""
diskwipe c: /noprompt
gdisk 1 /mbr /wipe /y
pause

This would delete all partitions, create ONE partition and format it, wipe the disk and then use gdisk again to delete the partitions. The only problem I had was with a disk that had no partitions to start with. It required an extra step of creating a partition then rebooting - DOS is funky like that, not recognizing new drive letters on the fly. I also cut a CD and made it bootable with the same DOS floppy image for faster performance, CDROM's are much faster than floppies. This also won't do SECONDARY hard drives, you'll have to make an additional batch file for other drives.

There is also Linux solutions like http://dban.sourceforge.net/ that work well too. I elected a DOS solution cause we had a trained chimp wiping all the disks on the old junk PC's, this made it as easy as "inset floppy, turn on PC".

Hope this helps.

----
Visit my homepage: http://www.cox-internet.com/stevedavis/ - BORING! ;-}

[Markus]

Don't remember installing wipe, so it should be in knoppix.

markus@fujibox:~$ apt-cache show wipe
Package: wipe
Priority: extra
Section: utils
Installed-Size: 120
Maintainer: Thomas Schoepf <[email protected]>
Architecture: i386
Version: 0.19.20030913-1
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.2-1)
Filename: pool/main/w/wipe/wipe_0.19.20030913-1_i386.deb
Size: 35496
MD5sum: e51ecfd363c69869709ea8064e768684
Description: Secure file deletion
Recovery of supposedly erased data from magnetic media is easier than what
many people would like to believe. A technique called Magnetic Force
Microscopy (MFM) allows any moderately funded opponent to recover the last
two or three layers of data written to disk. Wipe repeatedly writes special
patterns to the files to be destroyed, using the fsync() call and/or the
O_SYNC bit to force disk access.
.
Homepage: http://abaababa.ouvaton.org/wipe/