[Novalug] Hardqare (?) Question : Wipe Geekstick?
Beartooth
beartooth@Beartooth.Info
Tue Dec 16 13:08:52 EST 2008
On Tue, 16 Dec 2008, David A. Cafaro wrote:
> Not sure if DBAN supports wiping USB sticks, but you could always try.
> (http://www.dban.org/)
I've used DBAN several times -- whenever I've given an
old machine away, for instance -- but only to wipe whole
machines, with autonuke.
I tried going to [root@Hbsk2 btth]#, finding the stick by
opening Computer on my user's Desktop and drilling down with
gnome/metacity, cloning each GUI step with a CLI one using cd and
ls, and typing "rm -rf <stick name>" when ls showed it -- and
then getting the willies.
I looked through <stick name> pretty thoroughly, and
found it all so similar that I was afraid I might be deleting the
/boot from the whole machine, for instance, rather than only the
one on the stick.
One thing I saw was this :
== == == ==
[root@Hbsk2 media]# ls -a
. .. _boot .hal-mtab .hal-mtab-lock System
[root@Hbsk2 media]#
== == == ==
where "system" is what this machine calls the other hard
drive, containing XP and all my topo map GPS data. I didn't think
that should show if I were really going to the stick. I still
don't.
So I deleted the command without entering, and cd'd back
to /home/btth. Can I be sure that wasn't mere panic? Or did I
indeed drill wrong? Given the following, where should I cd next?
=== === === ===
[root@Hbsk2 /]# ls -a
. .autofsck bin dev home lost+found mnt proc sbin
srv tmp var
.. .autorelabel boot etc lib media opt root selinux
sys usr
[root@Hbsk2 /]#
=== === === ===
> One warning, using a disk wiper on a flash drive may
> significantly reduce the overall life of the drive as wiping
> generally involves a great number of writes to the disk. I
> haven't researched this issue, but it shouldn't reduce the uses
> by more than 5% of the overall total write cycles on most flash
> drives. But, again, I haven't looked into this in detail, this
> is just a wild guess.
There's been a lot of discussion of that on the EeePC
forums, and the sticks in question are indeed mostly outdated
bootable ones for alternative OS's for that, trying to find ones
that boot quickly *and* find wifis *and* prove easy for me to use
(without success, btw). (My huge but unsteady trifocal fingers
and dimming arthritic eyeballs preclude most uses for an EeePC
except in waiting rooms.)
Anyway, the latest seems to be that the solid-state
drives in the EeePC are more likely to outlast ordinary hard
drives than not. I'll chance it.
--
Beartooth of Bear's End, Squirreler, Historian of Tongues
What do they know of country, who only country know?
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