[wellylug] Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") HDD eraser

[Atom Smasher]

On Wed, 2 Jun 2010, marchetti wrote:

> I want to erase the entire contents, including the Fedora OS, of a 
> laptop's HDD. And thren start afresh.
>
> I have tried the above Darik freebie, but it did not work, returning to 
> the boot cue. It may be intended for Windows OS' only.
==============

if you're not giving the laptop to someone else, you shouldn't ~really~ 
need to secure-erase the drive. just install the new OS and don't worry 
about any old stuff on the drive. you can also install a new OS and then 
run sfill (part of the secure-delete package) to get rid of anything the 
old OS may have left on the disk.

DBAN is not intended for windows... it's intended to boot from the CD. you 
tried that?

otherwise (probably best to do this from a live-CD) you can run:
 	# cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hard-disk

substitute "hard-disk" with your drive, probably "sda". you can also use 
/dev/zero instead of /dev/urandom; zero should be faster, [u]random makes 
it theoretically harder to recover data.

if you *REALLY* want to wipe a drive, (also?) do this - 
https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

last i checked DBAN didn't support ATA secure erase, but some laptops will 
let you do it from CLI.


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