[Cialug] What are people using for a USB/LiveCD for erasing hard drives?

[Don Cady]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 11:30 AM, kristau <kristau at gmail.com> wrote:
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you can boot off the DBAN disc,
> start the wipe process, then eject the disc and use it on the next
> system. Nice if you have a bunch to wipe at the same time.
>
> If DBAN can't do that, then look at System Rescue CD (sysresccd.org).
> You can boot that into RAM, then use dd or shred to wipe the drives.

Yes it can. The only thing it wants to do after it starts is to write
back a result file, which only works using the floppy version anyway.
John, I third (or forth?) the vote for DBAN. It's quick, easy, OSS,
will parallelize the wiping, etc. Killdisk and the example Daniel gave
will only zero out the drive. If you use dd, you should use
/dev/random or /dev/urandom instead of /dev/zero.
Of course for the truly paranoid, you can always drive those drives
down to Walford and ask to watch them go through the shredder. (I
understand there might be a place closer, but every time I've looked
into this, it's always been a 'don't want to be bother for just a
couple drives' attitude.) I know a few financial institutions around
do this.

Don