full-disclosure - Erasing a hard disk easily

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Message-ID: <40F56749.1020503@rh73.com>
From: fulldisc at rh73.com (Larry Apolonio)
Subject: Erasing a hard disk easily

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.
>
>Darren
>
>_______________________________________________
>Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
>Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
>  
>
Been wondering why no one mentioned mke2fs

 From the mke2fs man page
       -c     Check the device for bad blocks before creating the file 
system.
              If this option is specified twice, then a  slower,  
destructive,
              read-write test is used instead of a fast read-only test.


 From the badblocks man page
       -w     Use write-mode test. With this option, badblocks scans  
for  bad
              blocks  by  writing  some  patterns  (0xaa, 0x55, 0xff, 
0x00) on
              every block of the device, reading every block and 
comparing the
              contents.   This  option may not be combined with the -n 
option,
              as they are mutually exclusive.

Isn't writing 10101010 then 01010101 then 11111111 finall 00000000 enough

I guess you would do (assuming a single partition on an ide drive)
mke2fs -c -c /dev/hda1

then

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

just to clean out the parition info.

Larry