Gentoo Linux: Secure and Permanent Hard Disk Erasure

As the formatting procedure of an unencrypted hard drive does not provide a safe method how to prevent a third person from private data revelation, the following method ensures the data sectors are overwritten N times with random data to provide a guarantee, that nobody can reveal them…

This post deals with software called GNU shred.

Usage

$ shred -v /dev/sdX

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Advanced Usage

shred -n N -vz /dev/sdX

where N is number of rewrites (default is 3) and X is the ID of the SATA disk (hdX in ATA/IDE case).

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References

• GNU shred
• cyberciti.biz FAQ