full-disclosure - Erasing a hard disk easily

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From: wszumera at chartermi.net (wszumera@...rtermi.net)
Subject: Erasing a hard disk easily

On 14 Jul 2004 at 10:05, Maarten wrote:

> > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd? ; dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hd?
> 
> I agree.  But be advised that using /dev/urandom is several orders of 
> magnitude slower than either /dev/zero or /dev/full, so if you're not 
> paranoid or the data isn't that sensitive, you might want to opt for only 
> writing zeros and ones instead...
> 
> maarten@...her:~> time dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null  count=10000
> 10000+0 records in
> 10000+0 records out
> 
> real    0m4.770s
> user    0m0.016s
> sys     0m4.513s

Thanks for the tip.  63mb took 67 minutes just doing \dev\zero on a drive that I am 
sending back to  maxtor under warranty.  This was a usefull thread  Box is 800 mhz 
AMD.  This was the most usefull thread I on full-disclosure I have read this year.

Btw, booting knoppix on a box with framebuffer for video requires something like 
knoppix mem=??? where ??? equals memory - memory dedicated to video.  For 
example,  on my 256M box, 256 didn't work but a number low enough to leave out 
memory used by frame buffer booted fine.

Wes