[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forums, and the sticks in question are indeed mostly outdated 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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