17th door – erase your hard drive, the right way.
m.schmidt am 19. December, 2006
I’ve bee questioned several times how to erase a harddisk and make it impossible to restore the data. The answer is: melt it down. So lets see what we can do to make it as hard as possible to restore the data. Ihe first way is simply deleting the files, and this is a bad way, because the data stays on the disk, only the entries to the filesystem (inodes, whatever) are removed.A better way is to overwrite the entire disk, for example with dd. But even then it is possible to restore the the content, because there are minimal magnetic effects that can be used for a analysis. So it’s better to overwrite the stuff several times, a job that does not make fun executed by hand. The little utility wipe can help, and has one big advantage: it can also ’secure’ erase several files, but not the whole disk, by overwriting these files several times. But the security on a journalling filesystem remains questionalble.
So if indeed the whole disk should be erased, I prefer dban. This comes as a little Linux, running from CD (or even floppy) with the only purpose to send data on hard disks to hell. It does this by using well known industrial standards like DOD 5220.22-M or the Gutmann method. This may take some time, but it’s safe, easy, and can be used nearly without any knowledge of computers. And i reccomend to use it, everytime you sell or give away a hard disk. And at least, for me it’s a good reason to have a ‘red disk’ again 
