On 6/1/05, Shane J Pearson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 01/06/2005, at 4:01 PM, Anthony Roberts wrote: >>On 6/1/05, Ed White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> I'm going to give away some old hard disks and I'm planning to >>> delete/overwrite all the data on them. Is there any tool to make this >>> automagically ?
If these are SCSI drives, you should additionally consider doing a low-level format. Many SCSI controller BIOS interface menus offer a format option, this will do a true low-level drive format. > > The 'dd' way is good enough unless someone is willing to to tear the > > drive apart in a lab. > > I think this depends on how you use dd though. If you just do a single > pass of zeroes, but fear someone will mount a multi million dollar > electron microscope forensic analysis, then yeah, that might not be > enough. Back to OpenBSD, if you never let sensitive data hit the disk in the clear (through the use of cfs and encrypted swap), the question of how best to wipe the disks no longer needs to be asked. > But write from /dev/urandom with dd multiple times to the disk > and you should be okay even with that extreme case. > If I were worried about open-drive analysis of the drive I want to > clean, then I'd be physically destroying the drive also. Put it in a > kiln, get the oxy torch into it, etc. I read the Ed's question as implying that he wanted the recipient to be able to get some use out of the drives, as something more than a paperweight. Kevin Kadow (P.S. Before anybody else learns this the hard way, *successfully* degaussing a hard drive, while not physically destructive, also renders the drive useless for all but paperweight duty.)
