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Information Security vs Business question here:
IT department asks me for a way to securely remove data from a hard drive because they want to sell old hardware.
I suggest DBAN as a secure wipe tool.
Problem: DBAN will remove every partition / hard drive it comes across including the recovery partition.
Question: is there a way to remove data from the "work" partition in a secure way while keeping the recovery partition?
Disks do not always map a logical address to the same physical location, especially SSDs. When a remap has happened, the physical location with data may not even be accessible to user programs like DBAN. Specialised make/model-specific tool will be required and they most often can only do full wipes.
So the only real safe solution is to clone the recovery parition to a new drive and destroy the old one. Of course whether you do this depends on how sensitive/valuable the data is and what kind of potential threats you want to defend against.
A more economical workaround is to clone the recovery parition (and partition table/MBR) to another media, fully wipe the original using the correct tool and clone the partition back.
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1cut it, provided/dev/sdais the primary drive,/dev/sda1is the primary partition, and/dev/sda2is the recovery partition? Or is that not how that works?