3

Possible Duplicate:
How can I securely erase a USB hard drive?
How to delete file(s) in secure manner?

I am looking for software/script/whatever that can completely destroy data on hard drive. By destroy I mean beyond recovery(even with special software). Is there any way to do this? Thanks.

Community
  • 1
zuberuber
  • 2,010
  • See the accepted answer to this question: http://askubuntu.com/questions/17640/how-can-i-securely-erase-a-usb-hard-drive – user68186 Oct 26 '12 at 15:12

3 Answers3

5

The tool named wipe deletes data permanently on HDD. To install it using terminal

sudo apt-get install wipe

To wipe out all data within a whole HDD type in terminal.

sudo wipe /dev/sdaX

where X is your partition.

jokerdino
  • 41,320
KK Patel
  • 19,083
5

Would this be something you'd be looking for?

sudo -i
shred -f -n 5 -z [Location of drive]

If you want to make shred do more distortion-application, then bring up shred's help:

shred --help

or

man shred
Anthony O.
  • 2,539
Omio
  • 105
  • Do I have to use shred from live-cd to format my main hard-drive where my OS is installed? – zuberuber Oct 26 '12 at 15:23
  • That would be best, since if you're running off a dual-boot, you would shred the "disk" file that Ubuntu is running from. – Omio Oct 26 '12 at 15:26
4

DBAN http://www.dban.org/ is commonly used for that purpose, it is an iso image which you burn to a CD (or other media), boot, and write random data over the disk multiple times (depending on settings).

Somewhat similar to something like

dd if=/dev/urandom of=#disk path#

Though I presume DBAN might have more options and a nicer interface

arand
  • 790