[Cialug] What are people using for a USB/LiveCD for erasing hard drives?

[David Champion]

Don Cady wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 11:30 AM, kristau <kristau at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you can boot off the DBAN disc,
>> start the wipe process, then eject the disc and use it on the next
>> system. Nice if you have a bunch to wipe at the same time.
>>
>> If DBAN can't do that, then look at System Rescue CD (sysresccd.org).
>> You can boot that into RAM, then use dd or shred to wipe the drives.
>>     
>
> Yes it can. The only thing it wants to do after it starts is to write
> back a result file, which only works using the floppy version anyway.
> John, I third (or forth?) the vote for DBAN. It's quick, easy, OSS,
> will parallelize the wiping, etc. Killdisk and the example Daniel gave
> will only zero out the drive. If you use dd, you should use
> /dev/random or /dev/urandom instead of /dev/zero.
> Of course for the truly paranoid, you can always drive those drives
> down to Walford and ask to watch them go through the shredder. (I
> understand there might be a place closer, but every time I've looked
> into this, it's always been a 'don't want to be bother for just a
> couple drives' attitude.) I know a few financial institutions around
> do this.
>
> Don
>   
... Or you could use the drive for target practice with .50 BMG rifle. 
Alas, the person I know that had one of those has since sold it. Now 
we'll have to get by with a .308.

If you're wondering how many drives you can shoot through with one 
bullet, someone has already tested this for us (the answer is 17 drives):

http://www.viddler.com/explore/HardOCP/videos/32/

-dc