Air Force have their data erasure standards. For data erasure, these standards determine the overwriting patterns and passes set by government agencies and private institutions across the world.

Can also try the command 'shred' ex: # shred -n 6 -z -v are numerous standards defined over the past several decades to govern data wiping and other data destruction techniques for safe and compliant media sanitization practices.

try the command 'wipe filename' (cf more detail man wipe or wipe -h).

Filling the third partition with random data : dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX3 bs=1M #replace X with the target drive letter.

Filling the second partition on the /dev/sda disk with all zeros : dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX2 bs=1M #replace X with the target drive letter.

If /dev/sda is the whole disk, then (on Linux, because the naming scheme vary from one Linux to another) /dev/sda3 is the third partition on the disk. You can wipe a partition using the same method than for the whole disk.

If you messed up your master boot record (MBR) you can wipe it using this command :ĭd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX bs=446 count=1 #replace X with the target drive letter. If you replace the device name, you can also wipe USB sticks and other peripherals. Use for example gparted to find the correct drive. sda is usually the first hard drive, the second drive would be sdb and so on. Important Note: You need to replace sdX with the device name you want to overwrite. The reason one should fill with urandom in case of required security is explained here: If you are wiping your hard drive for security, you should populate it with random data rather than zeros (This is going to take even longer than the first example.) : dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX bs=1M #replace X with the target drive letter.Filling the disk with all zeros (This may take a while, as it is making every bit of data 0) : dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M #replace X with the target drive letter.This will overwrite all partitions, master boot records, and data.

Dod format hard drive