Mark Hull-Richter wrote:
Capstone (so to speak):
I booted from the Seagate CD and ran both the quick and full
diagnostics on the disk. It failed them both.
Now I'm wondering what's the best way to destroy all the data on the
drive so I can return it without my stuff, unreliable or not, on it.
I suppose a dd from /dev/zero to the whole disk might work - am I
right? I'm not sure what block size or how many - it's a 400Gb drive....
the block size doesn't matter except for performance. use 1048576 (1MB)
or something.
Alternately, run the seatools destructive sequential write w/ random
data diagnostic, at least 2 full passes of random data will completely
scramble any residual data beyond any possibility of recovery. the old
DOD standard 1111, 1010, 1100, 0011, 0101, 0000 thing is obsolete, and
was based on MFM/ESDI/PLL bit encoding patterns, which no longer apply
to modern disks...
but, if the drives failed the diagnostics, it may not even let you write
patterns over the full media.
I suppose you might explain your data destruction requirements (are
these corporate policy, or government/military based, or just personal
policy?) to the Seagate customer services people, and ask for their
guidance. surely, they have a provision for this as it can't be
uncommon... they probably won't let you physically destroy the
drive, as I've heard something like 80% of drive returns are retested
and turn out to be 100% AOK, and can be reformatted, 'refurbished', and
put back in service.
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
