Currently when I want to wipe a USB disk with pseudorandom data in Linux I do the following:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb conv=notrunc
urandom is very, very slow, it gets to the point where the bottleneck is not the device. I know of another method -- the Mersenne twister. This is used in one instance by DBAN as a PRNG to securely erase data with, and it is easily 'random' enough for wiping drives -- and it is very fast. However, I'm not sure how I would use it in Linux. Is there a Mersenne twister program which I can then pipe into dd to wipe drives with?
I recently used a flash drive to try MeeGo on my netbook. Unfortunately, the application I used to write MeeGo to the flash drive created a new partition in a rather unusual format. The Ubuntu disk utility can't delete the partition, and GParted can't even see it. How can I completely wipe the flash drive from Ubuntu? I'd prefer not to install any additional software.
I had Ubuntu on my hard drive and tried to install Arch Linux. Things got messy and I now have an unstable, unbootable machine. I feel the installation failed because there were remains of Ubuntu. I'd like to wipe the hard drive and start over from scratch; without anything on there. How do I do this? I have several partitions made in a desperate attempt to make it all work. So I'd like to remove all partitions and any other information that's on the drive. I can not start any OS, but I can boot with the Live USB of Arch Linux...
I am trying to wipe the hard drive on an ancient laptop. The current plan is to find a live distro that can run shred or equivalent program. The problem is that most ultralight linux's don't seem to work with the RAM restrictions (Optimistically 80 MB, Worst Case 16 or less). I will likely have to just bust open the case and physically mutilate the Drive I would prefer a more 'civilized' approach (defined as one which keeps the machine in one functioning piece).
Model: Dell Latitude XPi CD Processor: Intel (Inside) Pentium (one?) MMX Available Media: CD, Possibly Floppy (I have access to only one other machine with a drive) OS: Windows 95
I am having a hard time getting any farther specs. If anyone knows of a distro that has a prayer of running in these conditions I would love to know.
Current candidates: Puppy Linux < 1.0.2 DSL (Unsure of architecture compatibility)
I have servers which contain SATA disks and SAS disks. I was testing the speed of writing on these servers and I recognized that SAS 10.000 disks much more slowly than the SATA 7200. What do you think about this slowness? What are the reasons of this slowness?
I am giving the below rates (values) which I took from my test (from my comparisons between SAS 10.000 and SATA 7200);
dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile.txt bs=1024 count=1000000 when this comment was run in SAS disk server, I took this output(10.000 rpm)
(a new server,2 CPU 8 core and 8 gb ram)
1000000+0 records in 1000000+0 records out 1024000000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 12.9662 s, 79.0 MB/s (I have not used this server yet) (hw raid1)
I have/had a PC with several hard drives, and a mix of ubuntu and windows on multi boot.The old boot drive died screaming, and I need to start again. (But my data is safe! yay!)
Is there anything special about which drive can be the main drive to start booting from? Or to put it another way, can I install to any of the other 3 and expect it to work, or do I need to switch them around so a different drive is on the connections for the recently dead one?
I messed up the first installation of Fedora on my server. My setup is as follows: Fedora and Gnome - NFS system, No dual boot (Windows or anything) Fedora ISO DVD downloaded No kickstart or other tools. how to set this up, from the time I insert the disk and have it boot up (configged already to boot from it). I know how to wipe it clean at intall time. Is that the root directory? And, is /boot the actual boot directory? I'm just having a hard time uderstanding that. As I said, I just want a quick itemized list, step 1, step 2, etc, from partitioning, creating file system, mounting, etc. in the right order.
i installed fedora 11 linux in my computer.but after successfull installation,i see that a message near the taskbar that "A hard is failing". what is that suppose to mean?
I'm trying to overwrite everything with plain old zero's so I can literally start from scratch then install Windows Xp Pro.How can I get around this, also I'm using the cd live.
Does anyone know about any usb ssd disks which work with Linux, and which Linux can boot from? If the disk also have a sata connector it will be even better.
I recently followed this guide to create a RAID1 [URL]... First I partitioned the disks with fdisk. I made the RAID array with
mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1. Then I created the filesystem with mkfs.ext3 /dev/md0.
I then mounted md0 at /Video with mount /dev/md0 /Video/ All according to the guide.. Today I made a samba-share out of /Video/Rorschach to easily put files in there from my windows7-machine (the plan is to steam from my CentOS-server to my HTPC which hasn't arrived yet). I started to put movies in there. It went just fine for a while but then I got this message: [URL]... How is that even possible when df -h looks like this?:
I'm using SUSE11.1, and connected to my system, a DELL 7500, a 1.5 TB Buffalo external HD. I partitioned it in 4 sectors.After connection, nmediatly the mounted disk would appear on the screen,(each partition with its respective name), and could use it as any other folder.To unmount the external Hard disk, I just ejected each partition, and had no problem. I used the same HD with my Mc, and things were all right, I used to backup automatically the Mc. However after having been using the system in this way for more than half a year, suddenly the hard disk began to rattle...and the SUSE system on the DELL, nor the Mc can mount the external hard disk any more. Thus, the partitions can not be mounted any more. When I cd to /media/ in the SUSE, the names of the partitions appear, but they seem to be empty..On the Mc, going to /Volumes/, before the problem appeared, the names of the partitions were there... but now, they are no more and the automatic back up either.So my question is, how to mount the disk, if it needs mounting... or how I can recover the partitions and the data therein... I am clueless, after two weeks trying to solve the problem..
In Fedora when we double click the Partitioned Local Hard Disks then we have to give the root password otherwise it will not open. Is there any way to read and execute the Partitioned Local Hard Disks without giving the Root Password.
I'm selling my Dell Mini 10 that came with Ubuntu on it. I never really used it much, and the only sensitive things on it were some PHP files with MySQL passwords that I can change on the server if need be. I'm not familiar with command line at all, so I'm having trouble figuring out the best way to wipe the SSD. I already reinstalled the OS using the recovery disk from Dell which said it would 'delete' the contents of my hard drive. I'm not sure if the job it did is suitable. What's the best way for me to make sure my data can't be recovered? Is there anything with a GUI I can download to help with this?
I have three hard drives that were previously in a Debian server setup to use LVM that I now need to access data on. The first hard drive had a boot partition along with an LVM partition, the other two hard drives were also LVM.From what I remember I have to mount all three at once for LVM to function correctly but I don't have available hardware (particularly a motherboard that can mount all old IDE).Can I use a USB<->IDE converter to image the disks, and then mount them?What Linux distro should I set up to recover the data?ow do I know what version of LVM is needed?
A few years ago I built a small Slackware system and, for storage, I used using a 2Gb Compact Flash card plugged into the primary IDE interface. Initially, I made a bootable CD rom, booted the new system from that, copied the file system to the CF card and then ran LILO to install a boot sector on the CF 'disk' /dev/hda. That all worked well enough.
The only trouble is that the CF card, being an early one, is rather slow and so I've just bought an Innodisk 2Gb Disk-on-Module which ought to be much faster. I have plugged that into the secondary IDE interface, I've run cfdisk to make a partition, formatted it using mkreiserfs and copied all of the contents of the CF card on /dev/hda to the new device on /dev/hdc. So far, so good. But...Now I need to run LILO from the existing CF card in /dev/hda to put a boot sector on the new /dev/hdc. Then I want to move the new device from /dev/hdc and put it in /dev/hda once it's bootable.
I'm stuck to know how to configure LILO to install a new boot sector on /dev/hdc. I don't appear to be able to make LILO understand what I'm trying to do. If I change the line 'boot = /dev/hda' in lilo.conf to 'boot = /dev/hdc', LILO aborts with an error message.
I use slackware 13.1 and I want to create a RAID level 5 with 3 disks. Should I use entire device or a partition? What the advantages and disadvantages of each case? If a use the entire device, should I create any partition on it or leave all space as free?
I have installed xp at the main hdd. It has 3 partitions. Then I installed Kubuntu 10.04 on the slave hdd. When I boot, it doesn't recognize kubuntu. When I searched at My PC in XP, didn't recognized the slave hdd. I switched the hdd (slave to master and viceversa) and it didn't go well either.
