request for extension: shred (wiping hard drive)

[mfrederickson]

Could someone please make an extension for shred?  We need to wipe our old hard drives before we auction them off.  Thanks.

[Jason W]

Shred is part of coreutils.tcz.

[lucky13]

In addition to shred, you can use dd (in the base of both TinyCore and MicroCore) with /dev/urandom and/or /dev/zero.

[Jason W]

Never used dd to shred files, but I think the particular of Lucky's command would be like:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/mnt/hda2/file

where /mnt/hda2/file is the file you want to shred.  

Or dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

to wipe the entire disk.

For those not familiar with dd.

[gerald_clark]

The first example will fill the drive with a file containing random data.
It will not just randomize the file.

[lucky13]

...Or dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

to wipe the entire disk.

For those not familiar with dd.

Or you could combine using /dev/urandom and /dev/zero so that you first fill the disk with random bits (once or more times) and then zero it all out. You can repeat the process n-times, where n = your comfort level. Running this combination once is the equivalent of a single pass of shred with the -z (zero) flag (which zeroes out the file/partition/disk on its last pass).

[Jason W]

Oops, seems the first example would need to be more like this;

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/mnt/hda2/file bs=10485760 count=1 conv=notrunc

for a 10mb file. 

I guess I had a brain lapse.

[robc]

wipe could also be used, it is in the repo

[Juanito]

Just for info, the shred command takes the form:

Code: [Select]

$ sudo shred -vfz -n 10 /dev/sda1
Take great care before issuing this command...

[coreplayer2]

Secure erase, part of the ATA specification is already built in to the drive's firmware which requires only a command to initiate it.  secureerase.tcz will perform this and more which uses hdparm to send the signal.  An SSD will take only a second or two but a HDD may take several hours to completely securely erase a drive.

It's already in the repository