how to shred a harddisk

[lukaluki]

Is there some module available for porteus to shred a harddisk completely, also empty space ? (overwrite with random data) + showing the progress ?
I am using the ram-only version.

[fanthom]

not sure about available slackware packages but brokenman is working on 'Porteus Rescue' edition and i believe that such tool is a 'must have' in it:
http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=3276

[brokenman]

For complete destruction of data I would recommend dropping it from a very high building followed by gasoline and fire.
There will be some some type of 'erasing' tool in the rescue edition. Not sure which yet but will take a look. Any suggestions lukaluki?

[roadie]

I've just been trying a shred gui, called Shredder, written in Python. It's a very simple gui, no frills, but seems to work fine. It hasn't had any activity since 2011.
I can post the link if anyone wants it.

[wread]

I downloaded once an el torito iso for that purpose. You just flipped it the cdrom, rebooted with cdrom preference, and the harddisk was cleaned in minutes.

Maybe I have the cd in my working place at the office. I will check on that tomorrow..

Cheers!

[brokenman]

I've checked out shredder already. Not sure I want to add python as a runtime dep though. The el torito is a bootable ROM so probably no good in this situation since the system being booted into will be porteus. Perhaps I can steal some components from it though if the licence permits.

[donald]

Journaling file systems:
On such systems, data remnants may exist in locations "outside" the nominal
file storage location.

SSDs:
Wear leveling can defeat data erasure,
by relocating blocks between the time when they are originally written
and the time when they are overwritten.
Wear leveling can also produce copies of the data that are invisible to the user
and can be recovered.

[beny]

take a look at this link maybe something is useful,btw you have to know the right device: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Securely_wipe_disk