• October
  • 1st
  • 2008

low level format hdd using dd

Posted by MaEl in: Bits-and-Bytes Comments


Need to securely wipe HDD data?? Got 2nd-hand HDD?? Got bad sector?? Yes, It’s time to do a low level format(Zero-fill). In Linux, we can use dd. The command is as simple as
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda &
[1] 5645

Set it as background process and it will print out the PID. This process takes a while depending on the HDD size.WARNING! This will destroy ALL data on the HDD, all boot sector info and all data on all partitions. To watch the status, just enter
kill -SIGUSR1 5645
62796+0 records in
62796+0 records out
65846378496 bytes (66 GB) copied, 1748.1 s, 37.7 MB/s
replace 5645 with the PID

For more secure option, you can try
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda &
or multiple level format
(maybe to encounter the superconducting quantum-interference detectors)for n in `seq 7`; do dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda; done #this loop repeats dd command 7 times

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