Best way to zero out a drive?

I need to turn in an old hard drive, however I prefer to zero it out instead of simply reformatting/nuking it with some third party software. Is this still the most effective DD command on ubuntu based distros:

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb

where sdb is the drive I want zero. Or is there more to the command to make sure every bit of the drive gets written as 0?

 

Maybe shred ? https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=246539&highlight=shred

Scroll down .. (shred -vfz -n 5 /dev/sda1 ( shred will make 5 passes instead of the default 25, additionally overwriting the disk with zeroes -z, and changing permissions if necessary -f)

 

What do you mean turn in?

Give drive to somebody else only zero'd?

Best way is not to do it at all. Use a blowtorch or sulphuric acid or a giant magnet.

Or give it to my grandsons they can fill it with games that should do it?

Just kidding of course.

 

Some options for zero'ing out a hard drive are given here:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1754969&postcount=2

 

Just zero out with 1 pass. Multipasses has never been proven to be more secure.

http://www.h-online.com/newsticker/...ion-a-single-overwrite-will-do-it-739699.html
http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-gutmann.html

Cheers, Nick.

 

OP,

The command you provided in your first post is the command you will want to use for zeros. It is also about the fastest method for drive wiping available. One pass is enough to render data unrecoverable.

 

append:
bs=20480
to the dd command
It's faster, at least for my drives.


If you want to see the progress, sort of, without mocking around with additional programs and pipes:
open another terminal
get the pid of dd (with top, ps, pgrep, whatever you have available),
assuming the pid was 1234 type:
sudo kill -usr1 1234

If you wanted to use the drive again for yourself you could use badblocks instead. It can write 0, 1, a pattern of your choice or very fast pseudorandom data onto the drive, then it reads all sectors and checks if they have the correct value (the one you've just written to it). So besides overwriting everything it's also a very thorough health test.
e.g.: badblocks -wvs /dev/sdb for destructive overwriting
check the man page for more options

hdparm is also an useful utility, however be warned, read the man page carefully, it's very powerful and can destroy the hdd (or another if you mistype a single letter... general advice: it's best to unplug all drives except the one you are wiping)
but it can show you for example if there are any hidden partitions, Host Protected Area (HPA)
e.g.: hdparm -N /dev/sdb to check if there's a HPA...
and hdparm -I /dev/sdb for verbose information

 

Thanks everyone for the advice and tips!

 

you can use that

http://distrowatch.com/6522

great distro with many tools

you also find a simple utility disk erasing 101