How To Wipe Hard Drive Safely

[silverbirch]

I assume this is what Just18 referred as "complicated", actually you run the killall command from a 2nd terminal and the output will be on the same terminal where dd was running ... actually dd has zero-out approx 7 GB ... dd is still running ... do not close it down.

Thanks.  I left it running - seems as though it is going to take quite a while. 

Much appreciate all the help - thank you all.  :-)

[silverbirch]

My friend just let me know that the wipe completed :-) 

Thank you all very much

[Just18]

My friend just let me know that the wipe completed :-) 

Thank you all very much

Great! 

Yes it does take considerable time.

I assume this is what Just18 referred as "complicated"

There is a means of getting a continuously updated output .....  I recall reading it not too long ago but decided that it was more trouble than it was worth.
I think there is another, more extensive dd package (maybe ddfld? or such) which does give an output as it works.
I have not used it so have no info.

regards

[AS]

There is a means of getting a continuously updated output .....  I recall reading it not too long ago but decided that it was more trouble than it was worth.

Code:

while true
do
   killall -USR1 dd
   sleep 5            # output every 5 secs
done

I think there is another, more extensive dd package (maybe ddfld? or such) which does give an output as it works.

dcfldd,  ddrescue,  dd_rescue. 

[Just18]

There is a means of getting a continuously updated output .....  I recall reading it not too long ago but decided that it was more trouble than it was worth.

Code:

while true
do
   killall -USR1 dd
   sleep 5            # output every 5 secs
done

I think there is another, more extensive dd package (maybe ddfld? or such) which does give an output as it works.

dcfldd,  ddrescue,  dd_rescue. 

What I read was much more complicated   

Yes I think the package I was thinking of is dcfldd