scrubbing old hard drives

[late_rabbit]

Suppose you have a stack of old, used hard drives detached from the
machines which formerly housed them. What's the best way to reformat
them?

I'm thinking of taking a ribbon cable and an active linux box and
hooking each of the old, used drives up to the active linux box. Then
I'll mount each drive that the system is able to recognize and find a
CLI tool that reformats filesystems. I'm guessing that if I do so as
root, I'll be able to run the commands.

The drives won't be completely "clean" if the NSA were to take an
interest, but clean enough maybe?

[Cliff]

Almost any LiveCD distro has a drive wipe utility on it. Just hook up and boot.

[Warren Sanders]

I use a live dban CD. Any drive in its path that it sees will be
wiped up to gov specs.

[late_rabbit]

Ok, good. Its on.

[Michelle]

DBAN. Dericks Boot and Nuke.

Michelle

“Sarah and Snowball” the cats in residence.

Some Stuff to travel with.

Volunteer Office Support, Habitat for Humanity

HTTP://michelles-adventures.US to see all my mis-adventures.

HTTP://frontyard.home.dyndns.org:8181

HTTP://backyard.home.dyndns.org:8282

[late_rabbit]

DBAN is shall be. What's the best way to get it and will it do
filesystem formatting?

Away, to google!

[Andy Laken]

I've used DBAN before to nuke 20+ drives we were giving away. If I
recall, you download an ISO, burn a boot CD, attach the drives you
need to nuke, and just boot from the CD. easy-peasy.

- Andy

[Bryan James]

Doesn't do any filesystem formatting, basically it writes random 1's and
0's on the platter a number of times (Very simplified explanation) to
make sure that nothing is recoverable. I do remember reading somewhere
but can't come up with the source now that the US State dept recommends
it for embassy's that think they may be over-run but I'm not sure how
reliable that is since the REALLY secure scrubs take a rather long time
to run.

Bryan

[late_rabbit]

I've never made a boot cd before, but I'm guessing its time to try it
before I sell these computers.

[Bryan James]

It's just an ISO image, just download and burn, should be all you need
to do. If the machines have floppy drives I know there used to be a
floppy version of DBAN as well.

[Seth McClain]

Here is a 'me too' post for DBAN.

[Franklin Marmon]

same, dban rocks.

frm