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What's the best software to overwrite a hard drive?
| Anything that zero fills. I used to have a floppy thay did it for fat32. It basically writes over the entire drive with hard zeros instead of just deleting target points and marking files to be overwritten.
| dd
| dd with urandom
| DBan if Linux gives you cooties
| >1.1 Find it out disk number and make sure it is not mounted, e.g.
lsblk
>1.2 then as root (replace X with your disk number, see 1.1):
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX
>Hint 1: you can speed up the process by using the disk buffer
>2.1 Find out your disk buffer size:
hdparm -I /dev/sdX
>2.2 e.g. if the value "BufferSize=" is 8 MiB, then do (like in 1.2):
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=8M
| >>364148
>Hint 2: To see a progress:
>3.1 use dd (like in 1.2 or 2.2) with an additional command. E.g.:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=8M & pid=$!
>3.2 Now use the folllowing command to see the progress of 3.1:
while true; do kill -USR1 $pid &&
>Have fun!
| >inb4 what's dd I use windows XDD
| >>364518
This brings me to the question, why "wipe" the data at all. I mean Microsoft and the NSA for sure already have a copy of it. Sending it in to another company would not make any difference anymore.
| just change filesystem and write something over it. Unless the company in question is interested in your particular data, nothing will be readable without recovery.
They really couldn't care less, it's their job to repair stuff. So unless you store 1TB of unencrypted cp, why bother?
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| I have a hard drive I need to RMA, and I would like to wipe the data on it before sending it in. What software would you guys recommend?