My understanding is that if you wipe with just ones or zeros it's actually fairly easy to recover what was there as you can easily filter out the zero or one wipe. But wiping with random noise means there's no way to easily filter it out.<div>
<br></div><div>If you want to be really paranoid you'd do multiple random wipes or physically destroy the drive and replace it. ;)</div><div><br></div><div>Regards,</div><div>James.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 7:48 PM, Atom Smasher <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:atom@smasher.org">atom@smasher.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div class="im">On Wed, 2 Jun 2010, marchetti wrote:<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I want to erase the entire contents, including the Fedora OS, of a laptop's HDD. And thren start afresh.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
</blockquote></div>
==============<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
DBAN is not intended for windows... it's intended to boot from the CD. you tried that?<br>
<br>
otherwise (probably best to do this from a live-CD) you can run:<br>
# cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hard-disk<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
if you *REALLY* want to wipe a drive, (also?) do this - <a href="https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase" target="_blank">https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase</a><br>
<br>
last i checked DBAN didn't support ATA secure erase, but some laptops will let you do it from CLI.<br>
<br>
<br>
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