On Thursday 28 May 2009, Robert L Cochran wrote: >I have a hard drive that I need to destroy the data on. What is the most >dependable way to do this? Can reformatting the drive as ext3 or ext4 or >some other filesystem effectively destroy the existing data? > >Is there free software that can write zeroes or some form of nonsense to >every storage location? > dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/(ice) repeated 3 or so times should pretty well destroy any attempts to recover any valid data from that drive. Don't use the partition, such as /dev/sda1, but the whole drive, /dev/sda which should also get the partition tables. Formatting a hard drive just installs a new inode framework and root directory. The data itself is still there for something as simple as: dd if=/dev/sdX which will spit it all out to the screen with only the holes created by the installation of a new filesystem framework being invalid. But /dev/urandom written to everything 3 or more times should render the data unrecoverable unless they wanna call out the guys with the electron microscopes to read the edges of the track byte by byte. >Thanks > >Bob Cochran -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. <https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp> Croll's Query: If tin whistles are made of tin, what are foghorns made of? -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
