LinuxGazette: Securely Erasing a Hard Drive with Perl

“When moving from Ohio to California, GNUJobs.com had some hard
drives (along with other hardware and software) which were to be
donated to COLUG (Central Ohio Linux Users Group). They needed to
be deleted before they were donated. 2 out of the 3 hard drives had
bad sectors on them, and the third I ended up using as a hard drive
for testing purposes, like creating this article, so I ended up not
giving any away. Still, I will need to wipe a hard drive in the
future, so I created this Perl script (which I will later convert
to Python and make it have more options).”

“The goal of this Perl script is to just delete the hard drive
at /dev/hdb (the slave drive on the Primary IDE controller) since I
have a hard drive removeable kit there. I want it to delete all
partitions, create one partition that takes up the whole hard
drive, and then fill up the hard drive with garbage data (including
some random encrypted data just to ruin a hacker’s day trying to
find out what the data is).“

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