On 11/08/10 08:38, Mark Rogers wrote:
How secure would you consider wiping a single partition with /dev/random, compared with wiping the whole disk? The reason I ask is that in many cases the idea is to wipe the disk and then re-install the OS, and if the disk has a hidden recovery partition on it then that is by far the best way to restore the OS. Securely wiping the main partition(s) then re-installing would be the quickest way to achieve this, wouldn't it?
I can't see why it would be any less secure than applying it to the whole disk to be honest. Any sector remapping going on will be at a disk level not partition level anyway so it should make no odds.
However in situations where I might want to use the factory OS installation and in the common absence of removable recovery media I tend to take an image of recovery partitions anyway, so even if the disk dies I can reapply them.
Just be sure that the only thing stored in the recovery partition is the factory state.