I have a pile of hard drives sitting around that need to be securely wiped. Does anyone know of something similar to DBAN or ShredOS for ARM that I can use to turn a Pi into a disk wipe station? It doesn't need to be a dedicated OS, just a package that I can run on top of armbian or whatever.
7 Comments
SpikesOtherDog@ani.social · 3 pts · 1y
Yes! You can use SATA secure erase features. Give me a few and I'll post a brief set of commands.
SpikesOtherDog@ani.social · 5 pts · 1y
OK, to be clear, you can boot to raspbian or your distro of choice and use hdparm if you have a proper SATA controller and connection. This does not work on NVME drives.
#shred
If you have a spinning disk and either are forced to use a USB to SATA adapter or if the drive itself does not support secure erase, then you can use the shred command.
shred -fv /dev/sdbwill write random data to the sata device sdb. f is for force and v is for verbose. You can add z to add an extra zero pass and z to change the number of passes. That means that
shred -z -n 5 /dev/sdbshould do 5 passes and then zero on drive sdb
It will ALSO work for older parallel drives that identify as hd or that still appear as sd with a USB adapter. You had better check your devices with a lsblk before you run it. It will probably overwrite the OS of a running system.
Last word on shred is that it is ungodly slow. One pass of 1 tb takes 1.5 to 3 hours.
#hdparm
For SATA drives that support it, you can use hdparm. A deep explanation of what I'm doing is available here: https://grok.lsu.edu/article.aspx?articleid=16716. I could write out how to do it, but it goes into greater detail.
For forcing the system to sleep, you may need to
echo disk | sudo tee /sys/power/stateAlso, be sure to set a password when prompted. If you omit the password, you may brick the drive. I have rarely been able to unbrick a drive.
This process may take several hours. The output of hdparm -I (that is an uppercase i) should tell you how long.
#NVME
Check processes here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_drive/Memory_cell_clearing#NVMe_drive
I have followed them once upon a time, but i haven't done it in years and cannot offer solid advice.
Fuck_u_spez_@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 1y
Very helpful, thank you! One question on this:
Are we just talking about a SATA hat here?
SpikesOtherDog@ani.social · 1 pts · 1y
I'm not familiar with the hat, you can always run hdparm /I against the drive and see what the output is.
Dumhuvud@programming.dev · 2 pts · 1y
Arch Wiki has a rather decent article about wiping disks: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Securely_wipe_disk
Assuming your Pi runs a Linux distro, most of those tools should be already present on your system.
actionjbone@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 1y
It's funny, I was about to post a reply to help - but I looked up my answer (just to me sure), and it turns out I was wrong!
So I'm learning something here, too. Bookmarked so I can see what Spikes posts later
SpikesOtherDog@ani.social · 2 pts · 1y
Turns out my comments were not brief, but once you get the hang of it you can write down the commands you are using and repeat them.
I scripted the whole thing for work, so it is getting more and more rusty.