Arch Linux

violagirl23

Member

Registered: 2008-01-24

Posts: 184

Shred command freezes up whole Live CD... can I SSH in?

My friend who knows nothing about Linux at all was going to give her computer to a coworker, so I was going to help her fully erase her hard drive then reinstall XP. I had her burn an Arch Linux FTP install CD to use as a live CD and then had her do cfdisk /dev/sda and delete the only partition, leaving only free space. Then I had her do shred -vz /dev/sda. The only problem is this is a 40 gig drive, and it gets to 1 gig and just stops. It doesn't just stop, the whole computer actually freezes. She can't do Ctrl-C to quit the command, and she can't even do Ctrl-Alt F2 to switch to another terminal! The whole thing just... freezes. And I really don't know why. Apparently shred ISN'T spitting out error messages (like when I had a broken drive it was spitting out I/O error, bad sector over and over again), but rather is just freezing all together, so that she has to shut down via the power button. If anyone knows what could be causing THAT, it'd be helpful, but if not, I figured maybe I could have her plug it into her router, do ifconfig to get the current IP, and then forward port 22 to that IP and start up sshd so I could SSH in and try to figure out what's going on (unless someone here would happen to know what might be the issue). Is this possible on the LiveCD's, or do they not include SSH? I haven't used one in a while (lost it, in fact!), so I honestly don't remember.

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"You can't just ask to borrow somebody else's lampshade. It's AWKWARD!"

byte

Member

From: Düsseldorf (DE)

Registered: 2006-05-01

Posts: 2,046

Re: Shred command freezes up whole Live CD... can I SSH in?

Don't get fancy. A simple dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/yourdisk bs=1M does the trick as well. There's absolutely no need to get crazy with multiple overwrites. Deleting the partitions beforehand isn't necessary as well.

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