[H-GEN] setting up Linux

[Russell Stuart]

I've taken the liberty of CC'ing this to general at humbug.org.au.
Although it is clear you are concerned about your privacy, you've taken
the precaution of sending this via the Tor network so it reveals stuff
all about identity.  H-GEN is full of people who might be able to help.

On Thu, 2015-08-20 at 05:18 +0000, gyfdrdedscf at sigaint.org wrote:
> I wonder whether I can get some help in setting up Linux face-to-face with
> one of the Humbug members in Brisbane from Sunday to Tuesday for a
> around-two-hour session.
> At the moment I consider either Debian or Whonix to be my Linux platform(s).

Not me unfortunately, as I am away all next week.

> I am not sure how many pass the hard disk should be formatted before
> reinstalling Win 8.1. I am not transferring all data from my current
> system to the new systems thus I am thinking about whether using the same
> Microsoft license on my future reinstalled OS will leak information that 
> the user is the same person on the current and future Microsoft platform.

Unless Microsoft has sunk to new lows a quickformat will be do.  If you
think Microsoft has sunk to new lows and might troll through the unused
sectors on your disk looking for your private information you must
overwrite every sector on the disk.  This is a good "HOWTO" on that as
any:

    http://askubuntu.com/questions/342857/how-to-wipe-format-entire-disk-using-gparted

However, since you are planning to re-install Windows, if you don't have
installation media (eg, a CD), you will have to leave the rescue
partition untouched.  If Microsoft does indeed go to the trouble of
trolling your disk drive for private information, I'd be amazed they
didn't keep a copy of any information they consider important in there.

The next level beyond a disk wipe is multiple writes of random data to
the entire disk.  This is only necessary if you think someone with a
budget like the NSA is going to steal your disk and spend months
analysing it.  If you are worried about, buying a new hard disk and
reducing the current one to a pool of liquid metal with an oxy torch is
probably a better option.

Finally, if you are interested in steganography (ie, hiding the fact
that you might have encrypted data on your disk), over writing every
sector on the HDD with random data before installing anything is good
practice.  You can accomplish that from the Linux root command prompt by
"cp /dev/urandom /dev/DISK-NAME", where DISK-NAME is the name of the
disk or partition you want to wipe - eg "/dev/sda2" is the 2nd partition
on the C drive.