On 3/13/11 7:19 AM, faithie999 wrote:
i rebuild old PC's and give them to a social worker to give to her clients. i found this program http://www.dban.org/ "Boot n Nuke" which yes, is a DOS boot disc/DOD-level erasing program, but if you have a PC around you can install your old Mac HD into it and when Boot n Nuke starts you can choose from 7 levels of data destruction. a pretty slick tool.
D-BAN is great for Windoze and Linux (my boyfriend has it for his Linux boxes). However, OS X's Disk Utility offers -- if you click"Options" after you select "Erase" -- "Zero Out," which writes zeroes all over the disk, plus two more called 7-Pass Erase and 35-Pass Erase, which write data to the drive 7 and 35 times, respectively. To the best of my knowledge, the 35-Pass Erase is D-BAN equivalent. The 35-Pass Erase also takes half a century (er, well, you know what I mean). However, if I was going to sell my hard drives, I would definitely 35-Pass erase them first. When I get a "new" used HD, I do a "blind" (just run, don't look) 7-Pass erase on it before formatting for my own use. I'd do the 35 in this case too, but it really does take a long time, and, not only do I not look on the "new" drive first, well whatever might be on it, it's not MY data! So I personally only recommend the 35 if you're planning to SELL the drive to someone else. Not everybody chooses to be as "blind" as I do.
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