Hi out there,
these days I wanted to safely delete the harddisk of my Root-Server, because I abrogated it.
So I asked Google for some information to safely delete everything on the harddisk. I found an artikel on the german newssite Pro-Linux [1].
The command
shred -n 35 /dev/hda
will overwrite the harddisk /dev/hda 35 times with random data.
If you aren’t so paranoid, you can use the default
shred /dev/hda
this will overwrite the harddisk 25 times.
If you are really paranoid and think, more ist better, don’t use “-n 100″ if you haven’t the time to wait…
My Root-Server has a 80 GByte harddisk and needed 28 hours to overwrite the disk 25 times…
Little tip at the end: You can safely remove single files from a harddisk with shred, too. Just run
shred -u /folder/file
this will overwrite the file file in /folder 25 times and remove it at the end of the process.
Sure, you can change the value, how often the file should be overwritten by using the “-n” parameter (see above).
bye,
christian