----- "Drew" <cothar...@gmail.com> wrote: > concern. I would like to leave systems "usable" (ie not destroy or > remove > the hard drive) but clean. Ideally, we're talking about a bootable CD > that > has a utility that will format/overwrite/reformat/overwrite drives to > a > point where there is a reasonable expectation that data that was on > the > drive won't be able to be retrieved. So - favorites, recommendations? > Input > on this being a pointless task because data can always be recovered? > Thanks > for the input.
First off, formatting a drive rarely does any truly destructive removing of data. Except for changing filesystems, the meta data is highly likely to keep living on in the same exact locations, so all you do is remove the easy lookup tables. So your thought of format/reformat doesn't accomplish anything of real use. Drive erasing apps must write patterns to every byte on the drive. They have to do that because erased files still exist, just aren't linked anymore. Good drive erase apps have to do this multiple times. How secure do you really need the drives to become? Hard enough that whoever your hiding the data from has to spend thousands of dollars to a disaster recovery shop to get it back, or just enough to keep a slightly more knowledgeable user from scanning the drive and getting anything useful? If you want to keep the kind of person who can do disaster recovery on a drive that would cost thousands of dollars, you need to have a wipe app that is going to write to every byte, probably 5-7 times. Now think about how much time this takes up and how interested you are in having it on your bench for that long while it does basically nothing useful. If you are only interested in making the drive unrecoverable by most people without spending tons of money, all you have to do is boot a simple distro and cat or dd /dev/urandom to the main block device of your drive like /dev/hda or /dev/sda. A friend of mine mentioned that if you talk nicely to the shred-it driver, they might let you toss drives in the shredder with the papers they shred. Physical destruction being pretty decent way of knowing no one will be able to recover enough useful data. -- Steven Critchfield cri...@basesys.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to nlug-talk@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to nlug-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
