Wiping Out Data

[Jeffrey F. Bloss]

Carsten Aulbert wrote:

> Jeffrey F. Bloss wrote:
> > This is exactly what I tried with a USB device, only using
> > if=/dev/random. It failed with the "no media" error unless the drive
> > was mounted.
> 
> Let's see, plugging in USB-stick, 512 MB in size:

# umount /media/usbdisk
# sfdisk --list /dev/sdb

 Disk /dev/sdb: 979 cylinders, 16 heads, 32 sectors/track
 Units = cylinders of 262144 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1          0+    978     979-    250608    6  FAT16
/dev/sdb2          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sdb3          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sdb4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
# dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdb
dd: opening `/dev/sdb': No medium found

The only significant difference I see is not using the "force" switch,
as per the method that was suggested... ;)

-- 
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