Bob
I have used this utility before with good success
http://www.soft32.com/download_191651.html
I have used this one with greater success
http://www.killdisk.com/?gclid=CKatoNLX4JoCFQENDQodO0xTAQ
both are free utilities
-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-list-bounces(a)redhat.com [mailto:fedora-list-bounces@redhat.com]
On Behalf Of Gene Heskett
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 10:54 PM
To: Community assistance, encouragement, and advice for using Fedora.
Subject: Re: OT: Can Reformatting A Hard Drive To ext3 Destroy All the Data
On It?
On Thursday 28 May 2009, Robert L Cochran wrote:
I have a hard drive that I need to destroy the data on. What is the
most
dependable way to do this? Can reformatting the drive as ext3 or ext4 or
some other filesystem effectively destroy the existing data?
Is there free software that can write zeroes or some form of nonsense to
every storage location?
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/(ice) repeated 3 or so times should pretty well
destroy any attempts to recover any valid data from that drive. Don't use
the
partition, such as /dev/sda1, but the whole drive, /dev/sda which should
also
get the partition tables.
Formatting a hard drive just installs a new inode framework and root
directory. The data itself is still there for something as simple as:
dd if=/dev/sdX
which will spit it all out to the screen with only the holes created by the
installation of a new filesystem framework being invalid.
But /dev/urandom written to everything 3 or more times should render the
data
unrecoverable unless they wanna call out the guys with the electron
microscopes to read the edges of the track byte by byte.
Thanks
Bob Cochran
--
Cheers, Gene
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If tin whistles are made of tin, what are foghorns made of?
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