Wipe a drive clean

[Roland Smith]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 01:57:47PM -0600, Andrew Falanga wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm having no luck finding hits for "wipe drive" or "zero drive" in
> the mail list archives and I can't believe I'm the first to ask this
> question but here it is anyway.  How can I simply write 0's across a
> USB thumb drive? 

I'm not sure about flash memory, but for a harddrive, simple writing 0's
is not a secure way to delete data. It can still be recovered.

> I'd rather not install a port, if I can avoid it.  I

Have a look at security/wipe.

> was thinking that something like dd would work, but everything I've
> tried thus far is not working.  What suggestions does everyone have?

I think the trick is to use the right block size. Try bs=512 or
2048 in your dd command. Use if=/dev/random instead of if=/dev/zero and
repeat a couple of times. Note that wiping flash drives way will
shorten the lifespan of the device.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
[plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated]
pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914  B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20080623/3109f723/attachment.pgp