drive erase

[challah]

anybody know a program that will wipe
out my hard drive i tried boot and nuke but cannot put it on a cd or usb my computer has no floppy drive
thanks

[beady]

Any linux boot CD will do.
Boot up and in a terminal type:

for ((x=1;x<=16;x++))
do
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda
done


That'll wipe out the contents of the disk by overwriting with random values 16 times. It'll take a while to run, but should be very secure.

The above command assumes you've got only one SATA drive. If you're using an ide drive, it'll probably be hda, so you'd have to change /dev/sda to /dev/hda in the command above.

Don't do this until you're sure you've got the commands right. Post back if you need clarification.

Also, why are you wanting to do this?

edit: I've also just relized it'll destroy ALL partitions on the disk. Is that what you want?

[challah]

thanks for the reply
but i will need step by step instructions
sorry
and thanks

[beady]

No probs. First thing to do is get hold of a linux livecd or liveusb image. Slax (http://www.slax.org/get_slax.php) should do the job. If you've got a spare 256mb or more usb stick then grab the usb image, else get the CD iso. USe the instructions on the site to create you bootable device (extract to usb or burn cd), and then boot up into Linux using it.

Once you get that working okay (i.e. you successfully boot into linux), get back and I'll talk you through the actual erase.

Good luck.