wiping hard drive

[slinky2004]

the dd command was what i wanted thanx alot i forgot about that

also, formatting the walmart computers isnt funny, some poor illegal immigrant is gonna have to deal with that now... wait that is pretty funny

[rcgreen]

Most drive manufacturers have free zero-fill utilities, which they,confusingly, refer to as "low level format". Use the one from your particular manufacturer. There are also utilities
available that claim to wipe out all data, for security purposes. (Google for them)

Unless you have incriminating data on your HD, just FDISK, format, and reinstall
your OS, and mom (or wife) will never find the Pr0n.


BTW, you do not have to "low level format" after wiping data. Low level format
only applies to old MFM and RLL drives (the big ugly ones)

[slinky2004]

its not about the pr0n, its more about wanting to zero fill my drive cuz im about to install stuff on it and make images of it... i thought maybe having the empty space zero-filled would help somehow, maybe making it easier to compress because all of the empty sectors are the same? would a drive image, like one that i made with dd, capture all of the after-data that may still be on the drive, or would it just fill in zeros for the empty space?

and thanx for clearing that up about the low level format stuff

[rcgreen]

I think dd grabs everything that's there, whether it's files or stray stuff.
There are utilities that will zero your "slack space". That's unused space
like partial sectors between files. A small file is allocated something like
8K (on some file systems), and this space is often full of garbage from
previously deleted files. If you are creating a clone or image of your drive, it might be desirable to zero this stuff out.

I used to have a program that would write zeros (or arbitrary data) to the
slack space with the files still in place, but can't remember now.

[valhallen]

One time i went into walmart and formated the hard drives on the public display computers

oh wow - please have my babies!!!!!

¬_¬

[slinky2004]

how long should that dd command take to run cuz i started to run it on my primary hard drive(160gb) and it was taking a long time so i stopped it halfway through. i'm hoping that stopping it hasnt damaged the drive. can anybody give me an estimate on how long that will take so i know the computer hasn't just hung?

the exact command was:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1M

[whizkid2300]

It depends on how large the drive is, just set it up before you go eat dinner or lunch. When you come back it will be done.

[slinky2004]

wow, it took about 11 hours to zero fill my drive(160 gigs)