All, Has anyone experimented with hdparm to have a ATA drive wipe itself of all its data? ie. I just noticed the hdparm parameter: --security-erase PWD Erase (locked) drive, using password PWD (DANGEROUS). Password is given as an ASCII string and is padded with NULs to reach 32 bytes. The applicable drive password is selected with the --user-master switch. THIS FEATURE IS EXPERIMENTAL AND NOT WELL TESTED. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. I do a lot of disk wiping. ie. Anytime we buy a drive, reuse a drive or get rid of one we do a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdx bs=4k type of thing to ensure the previous data is gone. I've found I can only do 2 or 3 of those simultaneously on my test box. Using the drive to wipe itself should allow a larger number with no slow down of the process per drive. (We tend to buy drives 20 at a time, so we tend to wipe them 20 at a time.) FYI: I just read that using the security-erase feature of the drive meets a US government wiping standard. See the whitepaper at http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/hughes/DataSanitizationTutorial.pdf Thanks Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org