[Leaplist] Unformatting Hard Disks

[Steve Litt]

I only feel the need to wipe out data when a hard disk leaves my house. The 
only reasons hard disks leave my house is they're tiny/obsolete, or busted. I 
use a commercial product to wipe such disks -- a 24 ounce hammer. Once the 
platter is bent in ten places and there's silver stuff all over the driveway, 
I don't think even the FBI could recover the contents.

SteveT

On Friday 11 December 2009 20:50:36 Kevin Korb wrote:
> I think shred is what is on SysRescueCD which I have around for many other
> reasons.  It has been years since I felt the need to secure wipe a hard
> drive.
> 
> Most of my data is encrypted anyway.
> 
> On Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:47:34 -0500
> 
> Hank Lambert <hank at hanklambert.com> wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> >
> > For partitioning, I just use fdisk. For wiping data, I use dban:
> > www.dban.org. It's a bootable ISO, and allows you to wipe up to 35
> > wipes (Guttman Method). It is freeware, not open source.
> >
> > - --Hank
> >
> > Kevin Korb wrote:
> > > If you mean wipe a disk with no data you can simply overwrite it with
> > > nulls like this:
> > > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd? bs=1024k
> > >
> > > If you want to make sure the data is not recoverable then there are
> > > utilities like shred that repeatedly overwrite the disk with different
> > > kinds of garbage to make sure that people with a laboratory can't
> > > read it.
> > >
> > > If you just want to delete the partitions go into fdisk or whatever
> > > partitioner you use and delete them.
> > >
> > > On Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:26:56 -0800 (PST)
> > >
> > > "Ram K. Singh" <rksingh54 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > > If there is a way to unformat and unpartition a hard disk.
> >
> > - -------------------------
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > http://lists.leap-cf.org/mailman/listinfo/leaplist
> >
> > - --
> >
> > Hank Lambert, KB4MTO
> > www.hanklambert.com
> > hank at hanklambert.com
> > PGP Key 0x96D33D71
> >
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> > Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
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> 


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