full-disclosure - Erasing a hard disk easily

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

From: james+fulldisc at vincentsystems.com (James Sneeringer)
Subject: Erasing a hard disk easily

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 07:04:47PM +1000, Darren Reed wrote:
> Too bad the pc Unixes don't have a format command like Sun has had
> for Solaris/SunOS....tells the hard drive to 'format' and then tests
> with a number of test patterns.

This can be done on Linux using badblocks(8).  It has a read-write mode 
that does what you describe.  Most of the mk*fs programs also have their 
own read-only test options.

-James