[Rule] Data wiping boot disk

[Liam Proven]

According to my reading and research, one of the major things that
stops companies donating old PC hardware to charity, at least here in
the UK, is the fear that corporate data may be left on the hard disks
and that this might fall into the wrong hands.

I have also read of a thriving business in Nigeria today, scouring old
PCs from Europe for data, for use either in blackmail, email scams,
spam or similar. (As a child, I grew up in Nigeria, and I find this
highly plausible!)

So what I was wondering was this.

Is there such a thing as a minimal Linux distro (say) which can fit
onto a bootable floppy disk, which just starts up, identifies all the
hard disks in a system, and after lots of prompts, securely wipes them
clean of all data?

I have done some Googling but it was inconclusive.

I imagine this means scanning all IDE controllers and maybe a bunch of
popular SCSI and RAID cards, identifying all the disks, deleting all
the files on them, then formatting the partitions, then removing the
partitions and writing zeros or random data over all the sectors. If
some internationally-recognised government-approved standard exists
for data wiping, then something compliant with that would be good.

If it could also be put onto a CD or bootable USB stick, that would be
even better, but since we are talking about old kit that's being
pensioned off and given away, then the trusty floppy is probably
better.

Is there anything like that?

If not, anyone want to help me create it? :-)

-- 
Liam Proven · Blog, homepage &c: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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