Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

On Tuesday I rebuilt a machine for a friend on Tuesday. Windows 2000 had decided that something in its boot process was sufficiently adgered that the drive would stop responding after a bit and would lock up the machine. Funnily enough, booting into the System Rescue CD was able to see the entire drive and copy all of the information off it with no lock-ups or obvious problems. Trying to boot into the Windows 'Rescue' tools on the 2000 install CD locked it up as well, which I assume was because it tried to access the drive in a funny way that the drive was no longer having a bar of (and which Linux didn't do, at least in its System Rescue CD configuration).

So, one trip to Harris Technology later, we have a new, faster, 80GB drive (and an ADSL modem for the upcoming move into the modern world of broadband for the Armstrong house). While Rob gets on with his actual work, I install Windows, install all the motherboard drivers and add-ons that Windows natively doesn't find, install all the Service Packs, and do so in only three reboots. Finally we copy everything back with the help of Explore2FS (because the only room on my 80GB portable drive was in the ext2 partition). Then, because half of this is client data that Rob's never quite got around to putting on the Raid-1 80GB SATA drive pair that is supposed to be his work drive, I have to shred the contents of this directory on my portable drive.

If only shred came with a -r option.

So, one small Perl script later, we have a mechanism that will span across multiple directories, shredding every file that it can find and then removing the directory after itself. I did a bit more work on it this morning to fix its remaining bug: not being able to cope with names with spaces in them because of the way Shell.pm throws parameters around (i.e. it creates a small shell script and passes the parameters into that, which then gets reinterpreted for spaces).

And then I found wipe.

But, hey, who needs a reason for reinventing the wheel?

(I also plugged the drive into the USB2 connector rather than the USB connector and increased its speed by an order of magnitude...)