[Novalug] Hardqare (?) Question : Wipe Geekstick?

David A. Cafaro dac@cafaro.net
Tue Dec 16 23:36:20 EST 2008


Ok, little confused with what all was going on down below.

One way you may be able to easily find out where your media is mounted  
is do the following:

1. Log into terminal
2. Run command "df -h" this will list what is currently mounted and  
there sizes in a human readable form.
3. Mount your media (plug it in, let the magic happen, etc..)
4. Run the command "df -h" again and note the change.  That is where  
your media is likely mounted
5. CD to that location
6. Run your LS to see if it's what you expect
7. If you are ever unsure of where you are remember that the command  
"pwd" will give you your full current path, also that "ls -l" or "ls - 
la" will give you much more information on what you are looking at as  
well as allow you to note if a file is a symlink and where that link  
may point.

Hope that helps some.  Based on the "ls -a" of "/" you listed below,  
looks like your on Fedora.  USB sticks should be auto-mounted under / 
media on newer fedora.

Cheers,
David


On Dec 16, 2008, at 1:08 PM, Beartooth wrote:
> 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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