Clean up Harddisk before Dispose of Computer

After 3 years' working as a heater, my Sony VAIO laptop is finally retiring. There is one critical task that must be done before it can be disposed of: cleaning up its harddisk. Since I graduated from a computer lab that researched and developed one of the very first harddisks in China, I long know not only deleted files but also overwritten files can be recovered. Nevertheless, this blog as well as its comments still give me a lot of information. There are some useful points:

• On Linux, shred can be used to clean up disk. By default it overwrites the harddisk for 25 times. Call it like this: shred -vz /dev/hda (-z: finally overwrite with all zero to disguise the shred process.)
• Or, use DBAN, which is used by many governments. DBAN stands for "Darik's Boot And Nuke". The software is a boot CD/DVD image that is used to boot the computer and then do the cleaning up.
• Here is the seminal paper describing the theory behind securely deleting harddisk data.

It will be useful to know how long it takes for shred or DBAN to process a harddisk of a certain size.

On my Sony VAIO VGN-SZ3XWP/C, shred takes about 3.5 hours to 4 hours to run a random pass of a 39 GiB disk partition! A random pass overwrites the disk with random bits. Not sure how random it is. The 1st and the 13th (possibly the last one, the 25th pass) passes are random passes. The other passes use different short fixed pattern to overwrite. Each costs about half an hour.

Further updates for running "shred -vz /dev/sda" on a 94GiB harddisk. The 1st, 13th and 25th passes are using random data generated from /dev/urandom. The other passes write fixed but different bit patterns. It takes 49h33m26s to finish.