Greg Freemyer wrote:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 6:38 AM, Hans defaber <hans.defaber@gmail.com> wrote:
What is the best (easiest) way to overwrite old harddisks with random garbage ?
thanks, Hans
Lots of ways, but the easiest is "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=4k conv=noerror"
Basically everything beyond that is overkill. Even NIST has started buying off on the above for drive 20GB or larger. holding confidential data (Older, less dense drives need more passes, random data, etc.) For more secret data, they require physical destruction I think.. I have not seen any docs that cover drives holding top secret data etc.
If you need a boot CD/floppy look into dban.
If you think you data is worth someone attempting a multi-million dollar recovery on and you think their is an ultra-secret government agency that actually has some SciFi like ability to recovery overwritten data, then take it apart and belt sand the magnetic media off of each platter. You should probably do that while wearing an aluminum hat. That way they can't be reading your mind during the process and somehow be using you as a transmitter to read your data.
Greg
Or you could encrypt it with strong encryption. Not sure how, but I hear its done. Jim F -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org