wipe disk with dd

Question

I know we can wipe a hard disk using random data or zeros, but is it possible to wipe using a fixed string ?

e.g. is this correct?

dd if="string" of=/my/harddisk ...

Also, does the options below say to copy only the 400th sector?

bs=512 count=1 skip=399

@SiegeX: Greg's right. You can attack this with /bin/sh or whatever, but it is a hard problem (because of the interactions of multiple levels of hardware and software caching between dd and the disk) and one that has already been solved by experts.

SiegeX · Answer 1 · 2011-03-24 01:53:01Z

up vote 4 down vote

dd if=<(yes "string") of=/my/harddisk

Also, does the options below say to copy only the 400th sector?

No, it says to skip over 399 BLOCKS and write 512 bytes worth of data from that point.

answered Mar 24 '11 at 1:53

SiegeX
6931311

	hi, so how do I get only the 400th sector? I though 512 bytes is 1 sector and I have count=1 ? thanks – Anonymous Mar 24 '11 at 1:57
	Nice use of 'yes' – Suroot Mar 24 '11 at 1:59
	@user bytes/sector is not a constant. On Linux you can get this information via `fdisk -b`, it may be 512 but it doesn't have to be. – SiegeX Mar 24 '11 at 2:10
	@Siegex, thanks. Assuming its 512bytes/sector which is already specified using bs=512, how should i get only the 400th sector? I thought by skipping 399 blocks, and setting count=1, I should get the 400th sector. thanks – Anonymous Mar 24 '11 at 2:13
	@user You would set `bs` equal to the sector size. If your sector size is 512 bytes, then blocks and sectors would be identical with `bs=512`. See THIS LINK for a bit more detail, especially the History section – SiegeX Mar 24 '11 at 2:23

feedback

migrated from stackoverflow.com Mar 26 '11 at 0:53