Simply Computers Wiki
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Erase a hard drive
A short link to this page is: - http://tinyurl.com/7axxa
This document describes how to use a knoppix disk to erase your hard drive completely and securely. There are faster ways to accomplish this task due to the fact that this requires a knoppix disk, but knoppix is useful in so many situations, it is worth the effort to create the disk.
There is speculation that the final command to erase the drive may need to be run several times (some say as many as seven) to avoid the most expensive and time consuming methods of recovering a users data. In the vast majority of situations, running this program once will protect you from everyone who might want to read your data.
The Steps
- First, you need to download a knoppix disk. Knoppix is freely available in several languages and from several countries here.
- Next you need to burn the knoppix disk. The directions to burn the ISO file to a CD are here.
- Obtain a "root shell" in knoppix. There is a picture of what to click here.
- Type the following command to completely erase the entire first IDE drive (/dev/hda is usually C: in Windows) with random garbage. This will take several minutes.
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda
