5

I'm soon to acquire several new computers on the grounds that I wipe their hard disks. I don't need the drives to be randomized, just zeroed out with dd.

How can I can boot Linux from a flash drive that will load into RAM, so that I can boot it, remove the drive, and boot the next machine to have several going at once?

slhck
  • 235,242
Ensayia
  • 96

2 Answers2

14

You could also use DBAN for cleaning drives. It's been around a while and works well. You can boot from a CD or from a USB drive directly into the utility.
The image is only 15MB.

EDIT: Upon further research DBAN does load into RAM once it starts running and the media can be removed. See Using DBAN section

Hope this helps.

Mike Naylor
  • 557
8

If you're using an Ubuntu live CD/USB disk, you can accomplish this with the toram kernel option. Add it to the boot options before you start the OS.

If you want a different distro, this list might help.

user55325
  • 5,113