sanitizing disc

[Pete Smout]

On 30/01/14 21:01, Karl Auer wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-01-30 at 17:07 +0100, Gary Kirkpatrick wrote:
>> I have ubuntu 13.10 installed on an external harddrive which I have
>> been using so it has my files on it.  I am going to give the drive to
>> a friend.  What is the best way to remove my files from the drive?  I
>> could just reinstall ubuntu but short of that is there anything I can
>> do to sanitize the disk?  How about make another user and delete my
>> original user?
> If you just delete the files, the data remains on disk and can be
> reconstructed. In fact, it is quite easy to reconstruct, and there are
> programs that will do it for you. Even formatting the disk will not
> remove all the data.
>
> To properly sanitise a disk, hit it several times with a large
> sledgehammer :-)
>
> Alternatively, use "shred". This takes a long time, but will very
> effectively destroy all the data on a disk. Read the man page though,
> because there are some limitations depending on the type of disk and the
> disk format.
>
>     sudo shred /dev/whatever
>
> Regards, K.
>

Hi,

To remove all traces of data on a disk use DBAN it is what the military 
use when nuking their hdd's
http://www.dban.org/
It will over-write each sector of the disk with random 1's & 0's six 
times (I think!) and leave it completely un-recoverable!

Hope this helps!

Pete S