[olug] Drive wipe tool

[Dave Hull]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 8:32 AM, Craig Wolf <CJWolf at mpsomaha.org> wrote:
> With the recycling event coming up, I am getting questions on how to wipe a drive BEFORE bringing it in.  I am looking for recommendations for a bootable CD that "grandma" could use to wipe the drive.  Any ideas right off the top of your heads?
> This does NOT need to be a DOD wipe, just to keep stuff from prying eyes.
>
> I know that the ultimate boot CD is my first option with instructions on how to get to the HD wipe tools.

I saw Scott Moulton given an interesting talk at Shmoocon this year on
HDDs. He said there was a secure erase standard added to the ATA
standard back in 2001, so modern drives should support this feature.
The benefit of using the ATA secure erase function is that it's very
fast compared to other methods, it can completely wipe a 500GB drive
in approx. 2.5 hours. The other advantage is that it wipes the entire
drive. Software based methods will skip bad blocks or clusters,
potentially leaving data on the drives.

As far as I know, there is no boot disk for this, but more information
is available here:

http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/HDDEraseReadMe.txt

Also, recent research has demonstrated that on modern drives, a single
pass is all that's needed to wipe a drive. There's less than a 50%
chance that an individual bit can be recovered using a strong electron
microscopy, etc. Dr. Craig Wright and some of his associates released
a paper on this in the last year or so, a summary of the paper was
posted to the SANS Forensics Blog a few months back.

Cheers.