A recent discussion over at the Donation Coder forum touched that subject. A user noticed that he was able to restore data from a dedicated server that was rented by someone else before. This can have some serious implications. Dedicated servers can hold all kinds of sensible data including user accounts, passwords, business databases, email addresses, personal information, photos, media and documents. Many of these can still be restored if the hard drives are not wiped correctly which obviously can be very problematic not only from a business point of view but also from a private view depending on the kind of data that has been stored on the hard drives of the dedicated server.

There are two possibilities to ensure that no third party will have access to the data stored on the server drives. Option A would be to purchase the hard drive from the web hosting company. Most will not have problems selling hard drives to their customers for a premium. This is actually a good option for most companies as it would mean that they will have physical access to the hard drive that has been in their dedicated server.

The second option is to wipe the hard drive of the dedicated server securely before the contract ends. The possible solutions are limited as the server has to be running to be able to remotely access it. One way to wipe a specific hard drive or partition of a dedicated server is to issue the following command:

shred -f -z -v -u /dev/sda

This will wipe /dev/sda, you might need to change that. The process will take some time obviously. The parameters mean the following:

• -f: force, changes permission levels to allow writing if necessary
• -z: zeroes, will overwrite the entire disk with zeroes in the end
• -v: verbose, display the progress
• -u: remove, truncates and remove file after overwriting

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Copy Wipe can be started from within Windows unlike Darik’s Nuke And Boot, one of the favorite disk wiping utilities, which has to be booted from. The advantage of Darik’s Nuke And Boot is that it acts independently from the operating system.

The disk wipe utility uses a Win32 console in Windows. The main benefit is that you do not have to reboot the computer to start the disk wiping process as it can be initiated directly in Windows.

You can select one of several methods of wiping the hard drive with Copy Wipe many surpassing governmental standards. Please note that it is only possible to wipe partitions or hard drives that are currently not in use which means that you cannot wipe the partition with Windows in Windows. You could still wipe it effectively in DOS though.

The second option provide the means to copy data from one partition or hard drive to another again with the exception of partitions that are currently in use. Copy Wipe provides options for sizing the partitions on the target hard drive.

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