Im going to start using tails from a USB. Since my laptop will no longer be used for TOR browsing, how can I wipe the free disk space so nothing is left over after uninstalling everything that can be traced back to illegal activity?
Moving to tails. Help on wiping my free disk space.
Im going to start using tails from a USB. Since my laptop will no longer be used for TOR browsing, how can I wipe the free disk space so nothing is left over after uninstalling everything that can be traced back to illegal activity?
[1 Points] None:
[1 Points] FistMyBellyButton:
Find a program that writes over old data with garbage data. That way it is unrecoverable.
[1 Points] sapiophile:
It's easy, but you do need to be very careful so as not to overwrite any of your actual data (it's not difficult to avoid, but the possibility is there, so just be mindful about typos and such). Once you boot up Tails, be sure to make an administrator password. Then mount your computer's hard disk and make sure it's writeable (I believe it will be, by default). You can do this by opening the file manager and looking for your hard disk in the left-hand pane, then just opening it by either single- or double-clicking (I don't remember which). While browsing your hard disk in the file manager, press Ctrl+L, and this should highlight the directory location in the bar at the top that it's mounted at. Press Ctrl+C to copy that location to the clipboard. Then, open the Terminal, and type cd [that location]
, pasting from the clipboard for that location. You can then type ls
to list the files, there, to confirm that you are in fact now browsing your hard disk on the terminal. Then, simply type the following VERY CAREFULLY: dd if=/dev/zero of=zeros bs=8M ; rm zeros
- this will create a new file on your hard disk that is filled entirely with zeros, which will grow until it consumes every byte of free space available on that partition, then delete the file immediately after. If you want to be extra paranoid, you can then repeat the free space fill with pseudorandom data, as with dd if=/dev/urandom of=zeros bs=8M ; rm zeros
.
Note that if it's an SSD, there may be some stray bytes that don't get overwritten - for that, you may need to use a tool like Parted Magic. But it's also very unlikely that those stray bytes will contain much forensic data.
Any questions, feel free to ask.
[1 Points] ziz1:
You may want to take a look at CCleaner or Eraser:
[1 Points] Dabblin:
Dban or similar; I don't know wtf I'm talking about
[0 Points] tailsjoin:
Your best bet is to wipe the drive completely and do a fresh install. There's no other way to reliably know that the data is gone. You can actually overwrite the drive really easily from within tails, but I have no idea how to reinstall windows or format/partition the drive after wipe. Fuck it, wipe it and go linux like a pro!
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