Why drive wipe tool for Linux is taking so much time?

Asked By susandwindsor 10 points N/A Posted on - 03/26/2013

Hi,

As drive contains secret information,inspite of formatting hard disk and it may be dangerous in some situations. So I used drive wipe tool for Linux (red hat) to erase all data. But there is a problem with it. I have given command “sudo wipe /dev/partition”and it starts wiping but it is taking so much and never finish the processing. I have checked and limit number of passes but it did not work for me. Please tell me how to fast speed of wiping a hard drive?

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Answered By Michael D Dent 40 points N/A #138280

Why drive wipe tool for Linux is taking so much time?

Hello,

 

While wiping out your hdd, the system writer writes zeros to every bit on your hard drive.  Depending on the size of your hard drive, it can take from half an hour to a whole day.  To do this on Linux you should use this command:  

 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M.  

 

This command writes zeros to every bit.  Also you can fill your hdd with random numbers, but this is very long process so I don't recommend it.  This is the command:

 

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=1M.

 

 

You can find more commands on this link:  

 

http://how-to.wikia.com/wiki/How_to_wipe_a_hard_drive_clean_in_Linux

 

Regards.

About Michael D Dent

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• Posted on - 04/19/2013
• Question Category: Red Hat Linux