[Cialug] Wiping server hard drives

Hasler, Chris ChrisHasler at alliantenergy.com
Wed Oct 19 17:04:20 CDT 2011


I should have mentioned in my first post that I have used DBAN in the past, but now I'm looking for other suggestions since it hasn't been recognizing the controllers in any of the servers I've had to wipe now.  

As mentioned I've been experimenting with shred.  I've been booted to the CentOS-6.0-x86_64-minimal.iso and selected the option for Rescue.  I don't enable networking or scan for the existing file system just jump into the shell.  Run a fdisk -l to see what disks are configured, /dev/sda for example, then run shred -vfz -n 3 /dev/sda.  This seems to do the same as the dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=1G command but will run three iterations, well four actually since the -z option does a final overwrite with zeros at the end.  

Chris H. 



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