Avoiding Public Ridicule (Securely Erasing your Hard-Disk)

Let's say you bought a brand new hard-disk and you want to sell your old hard-disk to John Doe, a really good friend. Also let's say you have in your old hard-disk tons compromising photos, enough to fill the Internet with twice, of yourself wearing a pink thong while you are posing for the camera. You decide to erase your disk to prevent the public ridicule. After a few seconds you have erased your entire disk and it's ready to be sold.
After a week, you enter in Google, but instead of the Google logo is one of those compromising photos, the worst of all of them. Suddenly, your cellphone starts to ring and you noticed your e-mail box is full... and almost all the subjects of all those e-mails start with "Hahaha". You answer your phone and you hear the voice of your good friend John Doe: "Hahaha, you sick bastard!! Next time really erase your data, you idiot!!".

And all this could be avoided... How? Well, with a simple and nice tool called wipe.

Lets say your old hard-disk is an IDE hard-disk and also is your primary disk with three partitions.

hda1 / Ext3
hda2 /home Ext3
hda3 swap

Let's say you have a Linux LiveCD. You boot from it and install wipe (if it's not installed yet). Then erase every partition with it:

Syntax:

wipe /dev/

For more information:
man wipe


In our case:

wipe /dev/hda1
wipe /dev/hda2
wipe /dev/hda3

Wipe's developers suggest only wiping one partition at a time
Then if you want you can erase every partition.

Now it's pretty hard to recover the information of the disk and you are a bit safer.

The moral of this little story: Never take compromising photos of yourself again

Annexe
If you want a LiveCD for free and without effort:
Ubuntu LiveCD/
Also you can donwload the iso image and burn it on a CD.