Mint Installer should be able to securely erase a hard drive

[Brahim Salem]

Recovery of supposedly erased data from magnetic media is easier than what many people would like to believe. A technique called Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM) allows any moderately funded opponent to recover the last two or three layers of data written to disk. So, I think Linux Mint installer should give us an option to permanently destroy data on our hard drive and make it unrecoverable so that we can install Linux Mint on any PC we want to sell or donate. It should be able to do what other applications do, namely:
1- Active@ KillDisk http://www.killdisk.com/
2- Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) http://www.dban.org/
3- diskwipe http://www.diskwipe.org/
4- Ultimate Boot CD http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
5 shred http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/15037/us ... ard-drive/
6- HDDErase (application)
7- Parted Magic (application)
8- Wipe and secure-delete

This would be useful for users and computer manufacturers alike

[Previous1]

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sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

That's all it takes.

[Neil Edmond]

Yep....what Previous1 said.

But we don't want that built into the installer...'cause then folks would be zero filling their hard drives, unaware of what that means. Then claiming "OMG, Mint ate my data"!

[Brahim Salem]

Code: Select all

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

That's all it takes.

but what if I want to wipe the entire disk?

[Previous1]

but what if I want to wipe the entire disk?

That's what it does. You can find which disk with

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/sbin/blkid

Obviously don't try this on the disk you're running the OS from.

[Brahim Salem]

but what if I want to wipe the entire disk?

That's what it does. You can find which disk with

Code: Select all

/sbin/blkid

Obviously don't try this on the disk you're running the OS from.

Thank you previous but when I run this command line and I didn't get anything If I want to erase the entire disk which command line should I use? because:

Code: Select all

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

wipes one partition only?

PS I also came across an app called shred here http://askubuntu.com/questions/57572/ho ... ure-manner! But I don't know how to erase the entire disk with it

I have installed testdisk and photorec with this command:

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sudo apt-get install testdisk

and then run:

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sudo photorec

and I followed this tutorial http://www.unixmen.com/recover-deleted- ... -photorec/ and I managed to recover all my files! so obviously others can do the same to my laptop

[Previous1]

Thank you previous but when I run this command line and I didn't get anything If I want to erase the entire disk which command line should I use? because:
CODE: SELECT ALL
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

wipes one partition only?

blkid is part of util-linux, that should be installed on any linux distro. What it does is show your various drives, for me it gives

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/sbin/blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="<somenumber>" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sdb5: UUID="<somenumber>" TYPE="swap" 
/dev/sdb1: UUID=<somenumber>" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sdc1: LABEL="<somelabel>" UUID=<somenumber>" TYPE="vfat"

Full path ( /sbin/blkid ) as not all live cds have /sbin in their PATH (the folders searched for programs).

The actual drives are in the /dev/sd(letter) format, the partitions are in /dev/sd(letter)(number). The root (ext4) partition /dev/sdb5 is the OS partition, ntfs /dev/sda1 is my windows drive (1 data partion only), vfat /dev/sdc1 my flash stick... look at the labels and types.

To blank the drive take the respective /dev/sd(letter), and put it to

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of=

[Brahim Salem]

thank you previous! now I know the diffrence between a drive and a partition thanks to you