[clug] Secure Erase of disks/drives

[Eyal Lebedinsky]

Alex Satrapa wrote:
> On 03/05/2007, at 11:05 , steve jenkin wrote:
> 
> This has been discussed on this list before in the last couple of 
> months, and is a recurring theme amongst the nihilistic subscribers  to
> the CLUG mailing list. Ask Google about articles from the CLUG  list
> with the word "thermite". It always comes up in these  discussions eg:
> http://lists.samba.org/archive/linux/2007-March/ 017400.html - within
> two posts someone mentions thermite (if not by  name).
[trim]

I see some discussion on the list, so here is my simple question of a
practical nature.

After reading a mention of "security erase"ing an ata disk, I searched
for a program that issues this command and did not find any.

I checked the kernel sources and all I can find is in
include/linux/hdreg.h:
	#define WIN_SECURITY_ERASE_PREPARE      0xF3
	#define WIN_SECURITY_ERASE_UNIT         0xF4
	#define SECURITY_ERASE_PREPARE          0xBC
	#define SECURITY_ERASE_UNIT             0xBD

So, is such a command implemented? How does it operate, and more
importantly - how does one issue it?

-- 
Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal at eyal.emu.id.au) <http://samba.org/eyal/>
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