A tech friend of mine kept a big permanent magnet handy and simply
wiped the hard drive with it.
On a Mac, Apple's Disk Utility provides four options to erase the data
on a hard drive, the most secure of which is a seven pass operation
which erases and writes over all data on the disk seven times. This
conforms to some DOD standard for erasing a hard drive. It won't work
on the startup disk, of course. You'll have to start from the
installation dvd or another hard drive. I once used my iPod Photo in
firewire mode for that purpose. On the startup drive you can only
repair permissions which I'm going to do now as it's overdue!
Roger
On 15 Feb 2009, at 5:36 PM, Bob wrote:
Another government agency I once serviced does the drill method.
Not only on pc hard drives but big mainframe dasd drives. The only
problems with the ash and drill methods are that the drives are not
only unreadable but also totaly junk.....
Bob
James Schenken wrote:
I don't know if the reference to CIA procedures is correct or not.
But, writing over all the sectors on a drive three times will make
the data virtually unrecoverable.
If someone wants to spend enough money on the problem, then they
still can retrieve most of the original data.
OTH, I know of another government agency that shall remain unnamed
that just puts the drives in a furnace and melts them down to
slag. Their data is guaranteed unrecoverable.
If you're looking for a quick and easy ( and permanent ) method,
then get your handy drill and make about 4 holes completely through
the drive casing, the plate, and out the other side. That will
stop everybody but the extremely well financed snoopers.
Cheers,
James
At 03:26 PM 2/14/2009 -0500, you wrote:
Karl,
What do you do to erase all the data completely? Years ago I
heard that the (US) CIA wrote over the entire drive three times
before throwing them away. I have a 4.5 gig drive that I can't
get at a secret partition on it. Even log formatting it doesn't
erase the partition. I believe it is a partition from a JAZ drive
disk that I copied on to the 4.5 gig drive. The JAZ drives disk
had secret partitions that allocated the extra good sectors hidden
on the drive so it would never have any bad sectors in its
guarantee one gig forever
Roy
*James Schenken
*
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I plan to live forever. So far, so good......
