Rick Stevens wrote:
Henrik Schmiediche wrote:
Check out:
http://www.dban.org
- Henrik
From: fedora-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:fedora-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Fernando Cassia
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 2:51 PM
To: Community assistance, encouragement, and advice for using Fedora.
Subject: Re: OT: Can Reformatting A Hard Drive To ext3 Destroy All the
Data
On It?
On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 6:00 PM, Mike McCarty <Mike.McCarty@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
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?
shred (man shred) will do it. "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" would do
it. Not that none of these guarantee that a disk will be unreadable.
Not even commercial programs.
No matter how many times you rewrite the media, someone with equipment
sophisticated enough may be able to read the data. The only way to
ensure that a drive is unreadable is to physically destroy the platters.
Scraping off the magnetic coating into a fine dust is probably the
best...it would be possible, given enough time, to reconstruct a
shattered platter.
But the point is how much does someone want to spend to recover the
data. If you don't have state secrets where noone else has backups,
then I really doubt anyone will invest the time and money to recover the
data.
There was a challenge put out to recover data that was erased with dd
but no takers. The comment that I read on the web site pointed to a
phone call that dd makes it to costly to recover.
--
Robin Laing
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