Can I get some help here?

Can I get some help here?

Trying to dispose of two hard drives with bad sectors, but wanted to wipe them beforehand.

Booted into a Linux live distro ubuntu gnome, and did the DD command to write a bunch of zeros. But apparently, it stopped because it couldn't write data to the bad sectors and aborted the task.

How to force it to write zeros to the rest of the disk even if it encounters bad sectors?

Is there something better?

Also, what exactly is secure erase? can it be used on hard drives? Is it better than filling the disk with zeros?


Also someone said dban is deprecated in the current year because it was meant to be used on older technology such as floppy drives. Is it true?

bump

Whoever said that about DBAN is fucking retarded. Wiping it with zeroes is too clean and should only be done as a final step -- being that clean means that it's easier for an "enemy" to deal with.

Also, read the man page on dd. There's an option, "noerror", that continues after reading a bad sector.

DD is fine for non-SSD drives. Use noerror if you've got bad sectors. And use if=/dev/urandom instead of /dev/zero, since the former would make it more difficult to find any remaining data than the latter. DBAN is for lazy people or those that can't into Linux. It's a smaller download and easier to run. It pretty much just runs DD in the background anyway. Same shit.

ATA Secure Erase uses commands built-into the drive firmware. It'll try to write to remapped sectors and everything. This is really what you should be using. Especially if you're wiping an SSD, since those don't write consecutively across the drive like old HDDs do, so you'd just end up fucking them up.

Nothing wrong with DBAN

Just drill a hole nigga

why does ATA secure erase take less time to wipe a drive?

Might have something to do with not having to read before writing. The hard drive already knows what it's going to write with Secure Erase, zeroes. With DD, it needs to read from /dev/zero and manage a buffer.

I keep hearing that DBAN is no longer the standard and something else is, but no one ever mentions what the new replacement is. Can someone please tell me? It's been on the back of my mind for a little while.

Read the thread. Specifically DBAN and DD are pretty much the same thing. The alternative is to use your hard drive's built-in Secure Erase command. The only downside to that is that it will fill the drive with zeroes, and if you're paranoid you'd want random data instead.

doesn't secure erase enhanced write random data?

or is it just more passes.

Also I remember someone mentioning some time ago that the nsa use

1 pass of zeroes
1 pass of ones
1 pass of random

is it overkill for consumers?

>is it overkill for consumers?
There is no evidence that anyone has ever recovered any meaningful amount of data after a single pass of zeroes. The only way they realistically could is if the data was consecutive on bad sectors that got mapped as bad while the data was there. But secure erase should still try to write to them anyway. DD wouldn't because it's at the mercy of what the drive will actually let it write to, so it'll think it's writing to sector X, but it's really writing to the reserve sector that sector X was remapped to.

>doesn't secure erase enhanced write random data? or is it just more passes.
It's manufacturer specific but usually both.

I see, thx for the answers.

Just take them out to the range and use them as targets. Hard drives are tons of fun to shoot.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

If it's nearly instant thats because your drive uses hardware full disk encryption, so it only needs to wipe the keys.

not instant but still faster than a normal wipe I think

Well secure erase has the advantage of knowing more about the hardware since it's firmware code. Could be better optimized, or it might disable shit that slows the drive down. Hell, it might spin the disk faster or modulate the head faster since the write reliability isn't important.

ATA Secure Erase is often not secure. Basically you depend on how the manufacturer implemented it (proprietary software btfo)

Read the manpages of srm.

>don't wipe your hdd goyim, (((full disk encryption))) will handle it for you
There were a few cases of full encryption hdd's keys being predictable/the same across different models

If the drive actually does use encryption and wipes the keys, that would be instant. I don't know if many modern drives automatically encrypt though. I know a bunch of external drives do. But internal drives? I don't think so. Maybe the other user has more input there.

>ATA Secure Erase is often not secure. Basically you depend on how the manufacturer implemented it (proprietary software btfo)
Yeah, that's a downside. If you're really paranoid I would do both. Because Secure Erase will at least try to overwrite remapped sectors. And dd feeding from /dev/urandom will actually put pseudorandom data on the rest of the drive.

>Read the manpages of srm.
What about it? I haven't mentioned srm at all.

>A few cases of keys being predictable.
Yeah well I never said ATA secure. It's passable for a drive with slightly sensitive data. If I care about actually wiping a drive I . Accept no substitute for physical destruction.

Unless you shred it to bits, tiny parts of data (like a few frames from your favorite cp movie) could still be recoverable. hdd information density is so high. the industrial procedure for destroying hdds involves acid baths or thorough melting.

I don't think you understand how badly a drive gets shot up in a day at the range. Then the remains are left in the field along with every other drive that was used as a target.
Also that shit was encrypted in the first place. Good fucking luck.

In that case you could save yourself a trip to the range and just open up the drive and hit it with a hammer a few times. That way you get some nice magnets too. Either way still has data theoretically recoverable. The thread seemed more about ensuring no data at all survived.

Well targets are expensive. A drive I want dead is free.
You're paranoid if you think data is more recoverable via dban than the drive getting shot up.

>Sup Forums doesn't melt their HDDs

wew lads

Just fucking destroy it. seriously you fags are making this way more difficult than it has to be. Hit the fucking thing with a hammer until it sounds like a maraca when you shake it.

why If I want to sell it

Stop being silly. Who the fuck buys used spinner hard disks?

I do-