[sf-lug] Linus say no change to Kernel to ease MS signing

[Rick Moen]

Quoting maestro (maestro415 at gmail.com):

> ^ 2. you can run a piece of software (forget name in this moment and some
> see as overkill) that is open source and 'scrubs' the hard drive completely
> of everything...

dban = Darik's Boot and Nuke is probably what you're talking about.
http://www.dban.org/

However, that's overkill if you just want a _functionally_ bare hard
drive.  For that purpose, it's sufficient to just delete (or depopulate)
the partition table[1] in any of a large number of ways.  One of many:

Running from an Linux installation or maintenance media:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

This zeroes out the 512-byte first sector of the /dev/sda device (make
sure you clobber the right one!), which includes the MBR program and
partition table (if any).

That's a _functionaly_ bare hard drive.  dban is where you want the
former contents to not be recoverable by forensic techniques available
to anyone except very major governments and corporations willing to
expend very major time and money.  (If you want to keep them out, take
the hard drive apart and feed the platters into a smelter.)

[1] GPT systems have partition data in a bunch of other places, too.