[TriLUG] HD Block Size (newbieish question)

[Corey Mutter]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 01:04:42PM -0400, B Smith wrote:
> I'm about to give an older computer to a friend of mine, but before I do 
> so I would like to clean the hard drive thoroughly. I was thinking that 
> a few ` dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda ` would do the job, but am unsure 
> of what block size to use. Is there an easy way to find out the hard 
> drive's block size?

It doesn't matter; a simple "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda" (or whatever
drive you're using) will work (it'll just go until the end, then stop with a
"No space left on device" error). 

If you have the patience, after this, repeat using /dev/zero (so that the
HDD will get delivered to the person with all-zeroes data, rather than
gibberish data) - you wouldn't want XP or whatever utilities trying to
"repair" a gibberish partition table, for example.

Corey

> 
> Thanks a ton!
> 
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