[ubuntu-uk] mbr

[Andy Smith]

Hello,

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 10:41:36AM +0000, Ted Wager wrote:
> I used gparted to blank a couple of hdd's that I am getting rid of
> however the mbrr was not formatted and they still boot from grub.
> Anyone tell me how I format the drive so it is completely blank ?

Ah, the old "how do I securely erase a drive" chestnut. :) People
are often keen to go into a lot of detail about the ingenious
methods they use to overwrite data, destroy drives, etc. etc.
because clearly the security of their data is of immense importance
and you just can't be sure, right?

For all practical purposes, overwriting the entire disk just once
with something like dd, e.g.:

    $ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4M

will render it unrecoverable. No data recovery company will promise
to be able to get any data whatsoever off of that. This is the
quickest way to achieve what you want while still ending up with a
working drive. If someone thinks they can get any data off of that,
they should be asked why they aren't in the commercial data recovery
business, since they apparently know how to do it better than anyone
else who is. :)

In theory there may be data left in inaccessible areas of the drive,
such as the spare sectors that the manufacturer included.  In theory
an entity with a vast amount of resources may be able to take your
drive apart in a lab and use minute differences in magnetic field to
guess at what was written before the single pass of data was written
over the top by dd.

If that is a realistic risk for you¹, then you may want to retire to
your island stronghold and instruct a henchman to run Darik's boot
and nuke (DBAN). This may take a day or more, especially if you use
one of the more thorough modes.

If you need quick and don't care about the drive working afterwards,
melt the platters to liquid or grind them down to dust.

Cheers,
Andy

¹ Or maybe if you just want to be able to honestly say to some third
  party whose data you held that it really is gone.

-- 
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

"Xandros's low-level support for the Eee mostly seemed to consist of a pile of
 shell scripts made of cheese and failure." -- Matthew Garrett
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