Secure Delete

So I’m selling off my old laptop to someone who found my listing on AllMSU, and so I decided to do a proper secure delete. After some quick research I found Secure Delete from The Hacker’s Choice. They’re some very flexible tools to delete files/partitions/etc so they can never be recovered. What I ended up doing in this case, though, is wiping the entire partiton clean off while booted from a Knoppix CD. This article shows how to use the “shred” tool.

# shred -n 2 -z -v /dev/hda1

Which will overwrite every bit on the drive with random (or otherwise generated) 1’s and 0’s bits for TWO passes before going back over again on a THIRD pass to make everything 0 again. Needless to say, this is taking quite some time…

Paranoia? Perhaps… but any security savvy person would say it is generally good practice (that many still do not follow).