• Rustmilian@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            edit-2
            9 months ago

            sudo cat /dev/urandom > /dev/*
            Or
            sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=4k conv=notrunc,noerror

            P.s. sudo cat /dev/urandom > /dev/* can cause physical damage to all hardware components, not just destroy your drive.

              • z3bra@lemmy.sdf.org
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                0
                ·
                9 months ago

                Well as I see it, it will just do a lot of write operations to your disk, which might eventually damage it if you do it a lot (just like any write operation done on a disk). However, this specific command isn’t bad per se, and is even technically a good thing to do for preparing to full disk encryption.

                • barsoap@lemm.ee
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  0
                  ·
                  9 months ago

                  We aren’t in the days of olde any more were disks would execute every random order you give them without thought… also, writing to /dev isn’t going to do that it’s simply going to give the disks write orders, /dev is quite a bit less raw than the firmware interfaces (SATA etc).

                  What you’re really doing here is fuzzing both the kernel and device firmware. You might find a bug but finding bugs doesn’t break things it just lays bare how stuff was always broken. Typically nothing a hard reset won’t fix.

                  • z3bra@lemmy.sdf.org
                    link
                    fedilink
                    arrow-up
                    0
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    9 months ago

                    I didn’t come up with this idea myself, this is straight from OpenBSD disk setup guide (which I personally trust as a good source of info) :

                    Encrypting External Disks

                    This section explains how to set up a cryptographic softraid volume for an external USB drive. An outline of the steps is as follows:

                    • Overwrite the drive’s contents with random data

                    […]

                    # dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/rsd3c bs=1m`
                    
              • Rustmilian@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                0
                ·
                edit-2
                9 months ago

                It blasts all virtual device files that directly represent the hardware of the system; from disks to audio devices and so on; with extremely random data potentially causing irreversible damage.

            • z3bra@lemmy.sdf.org
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              9 months ago

              sudo cat is pointless here, better do

              </dev/urandom sudo tee /dev/sd*
              

              As a bonus it’ll scramble your terminal 💪