Simply erasing everything obviously won't leave the hard drive scrubbed clean. However, it's actually very easy to make 'your' data unrecoverable. Just overwrite it with something else.
1 - Delete all current partitions 2 - Create a new partition filling the entire drive 3 - Format the new partition 4 - Fill the hard drive 5 - Repeat as desired The reason for first deleting and recreating a single partition is that certain filesystems retain a lot of file information and sometimes even the entire file within the allocation tables (for example, NTFS). Deleting and recreating a single partition doesn't delete those structures, but does invalidate them and allows them to be overwritten. There are limitations to this method. For example, FAT has filesize limits that will not allow you to completely fill a 40GB drive with a single file. (The workaround is to create subdirs and then rerun the script there.) Not to mention, this can take <understatement> a very long time </understatement> on a large hard drive, so software designed specifically to do this is probably a good idea. However, as a quick and dirty first approximation... Here's a batch file for step 4 that does the trick: BEGIN ----- Wipe.bat ----- if "%1"=="" goto CreateFile goto CopyFile :CreateFile echo xxxxxxxx > Wipe.xxx if exist Wipe.xxx call %0 Wipe.xxx Wipe.yyy goto End :CopyFile del %2 copy %1+%1+%1+%1+%1+%1+%1+%1 %2 if exist %2 call %0 %2 %1 goto End :End END ----- Wipe.bat ----- Josh -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of John Noll Sent: Tuesday, 02 September, 2003 22:52 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [uug] Scrub the hard Drive clean I'm trying to sell my laptop, and would like to scrub the Hard Drive clean; so my personal files, financial data, etc. are not recoverable to the new owner. Is there a good utility to use to scrub a hard drive clean, so the data is not recoverable? Would Eraser work? I'm trying to figure out a utility that is running on an OS could delete that OS. Ummmh? Anyway, any pointers? thanks, john ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
