Mike Meyer wrote: > "Terry Reedy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >>On *nix, one could open '/dev/rawdisk' (actual name depends on the *nix >>build) and write a tracks worth of garbage for as many tracks as there are. >>I don't how to programmaticly get the track size and number (if there is a >>standard way at all). > > > Modern Unix systems assume drives don't care much about geometry, what > with sector forwarding and variable track lengths and the like. > > Just open the raw disk device (assuming your Unix has such), and start > writing data to it. Keep going until the write fails at the end of the > media. > > <mike
Wouldn't /dev/urandom or /dev/random on Linux systems work better? It's the kernel's built in random number generator. It'd fill the drive with random bits of data. You could loop it too... in fact, I think many of the pre-packaged *wipe* programs are mini Linux distros that do just this. dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/your_hard_drive -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
