[ILUG] wiping a faulty hard disk

[Karl O'Dwyer]

Hi Patrick,

I can understand the need to remove any readable data off a hard disc,  the
need to ensure nothing can be recovered from the disc along with the need to
ensure that you don't void the warranty is a tricky one,

now this sorta old school unix, but put the discs into a spare machine and
using a live distro of your choice,

start a terminal and as root

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda (change /dev/hda to what ever the hard disk
is)

is will take a while, day or two if your lucky, it writes over the hard disk
with pseudorandom data.

that will make the data pretty irrecoverable, but i provide no warranty with
this information, use it at your own discretion

oh for added security make sure that the outside of the disk or its postal
packaging has no indication that it came from your company , that reduces
the likelihood of it being nicked

-Karl