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I have a question about hard drive data security. The hard drive on my
notebook is failing and Dell is going to replace it. They are going to
take the old one with them. How can I securely remove the data from the
hard drive?
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there are several ways to do this, some good, some bad... i'm not going to
attempt to cover all of the possibilities; i'll just mention what i'd do
(i consider it to be good)... this assumes you're in a *nix environment.
install the drive on a computer that's running some flavor of *nix. don't
mount the drive. let's say, hypothetically, the system sees at /dev/hd2.
one way to write random garbage to the disk is:
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hd2
this will probably take a while and may slow everything down, but it's
thoroughly wiping the disk.
repeat as necessary, based on what you perceive your threat model to be.
if you're concerned about the drive showing up on ebay or a garage sale,
wiping it once or twice should be fine. if you're concerned that a govt
spy agency is taking interest in your data, wipe at least seven times.
i will point out the urandom is a CSPRNG, not a ~true~ RNG. this may be a
concern to some in the tin-foil-hat crowd, and can be solved with:
tail -f /dev/random > /dev/hd2
but that will take a *really* *long* time to fill up a disk.
...atom
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PGP key - http://atom.smasher.org/pgp.txt
762A 3B98 A3C3 96C9 C6B7 582A B88D 52E4 D9F5 7808
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"The World Bank, IMF, and private banks have consistently
lavished huge sums on terror regimes, following their
displacement of democratic governments, and a number of
quantitative studies have shown a systematic positive
relationship between U.S. and IMF/World Bank aid to
countries and their violations of human rights."
-- Edward S. Herman, economist,
U.S. media and foreign policy critic,
author of 'The Real Terror Network'
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