Purging could include overwriting procedures, but could also mean options like secure erase or cryptographic erase, as well as destructive techniques that effectively prevent access to data. “Section 5 Summary of Sanitization Methods” defines three steps: clearĬlearing data involves an overwriting process, by which target data is replaced with non-sensitive data (junk data). DoD 5220.22-M has not been updated in recent times and does not apply to more modern technologies like SSDs.

NIST 800-88 has become the “go-to” media sanitization standard when compared to another well-known standard, Department of Defense (DoD) 5220.22-M. However, if you consider stronger standards, you need to look at options described in NIST 800-88 Rev 1. If you want something simple and not DoD or industry-approved, these tools/utilities could do a basic job: a) Shred.Į) Boot from a rescue disk and write to the physical device or partition using dd: The main question is what secure disk clean really is for your organisation and you. RJ and Jamie already gave you some options to consider. UPDATED/ADDED: Please see the very relevant post below from Jamie Bainbridge of Red Hat It's probably a good idea to unmount it first so that no one is using it, including a possible cron.įor the sake of discussion, let's say the drive you wish to wipe is on sdb, you could do this: ~ ] # sudo wipefs -all -force /dev/sdb* You can also type man wipefs to see Red Hat's man page.īefore proceeding, please know that you need to verify beyond any shadow of a doubt the actual file system you wish to run wipefs against. Please do see the manual 'man' page for the wipefs command. However, for you, consider 'scrub' above. To answer your immediate question of securely wiping a partition, please see this Red Hat link discussing the use of 'scrub' DISCLAIMER SEE Jamie Bainbridge's post below.įor generic non-secure wiping of a partition, wipefs would be an option. It's worth double if not triple-checking this just to make sure. I'll mention it twice here, please make absolutely certain you really target the proper disk to be scrubbed.

Wipe drive 9