#77 data erasing

[Anonymous]

I would like to see it include tools to write random stuff
over a hard drive in a computer that you want to give
away\ donate. Many people store personal information
on their pc's and this would be an effective way to gain
some peice of mind about such things as identity theft
before donating a pc.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Logged In: NO

If the installation has dd you can write most any data to the disk. Examples... dd if=<input file or device> of=<output file or device> -- dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda .... /dev/random is random but kinda pseudo random and can be changed to /dev/zero to write zeros, or /dev/dsp to write sound info.
dcfldd is a variant of dd with more feautes for writing out MD5s when dd disk data and other benefits. It was a variant by Nicholas Harbour of the US Department of Defense Computer Forensics Lab.