I have a windoz xp disk that got infected by a virus, a particularly nasty one that hides in a gazillion places and 'activates' on many actions including plugging in any usb device, file writes, etc.
I want to completely erase the files, not just mark the file deleted. So, using an ubuntu 12 live CD, I figured I could shred the C directory and eliminate the threat. So, to shred everything, I needed to follow each directory recursively.
I used the following command:
find * -exec shred -f -v -z -u {} \;
For 20 gb of data, the shredding lasted about 28 hrs.
After it was completed, I viewed the directory using: ls -l
. I expected to see no files. What I saw instead was each filename with a green background. There were a few filename withouth the green background but the text was in green. So, what the heck does the green background mean, and more importantly, why are the files still there?
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1
?