FYI: Wiping a hard drive really clean

[Matthew Carpenter]

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Mike Reinehr wrote:

> On Monday 23 May 2005 09:15 am, Michael Hipp wrote:
>
>> The topic of how to wipe a hard drive truly clean has come up a
>> couple of times. There's a good article on DistroWatch Weekly
>> about it:
>>
>> http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20050523#osa
>>
>> Michael
>
>
> Out of curiosity, couldn't you accomplish the same thing as DBAN by
> booting your PC from Knoppix and then running dd if=/dev/random
> of=/dev/hda ... a few times, i.e., 3, 7, 23, etc.?
>
> Alternatively, I seem to recall reading about encrypted file
> systems, but don't know any details.
>
> cmr

7 is the magic number (supposedly).  I do know that the government has
the capacity to pull off data which has been overwritten at least 3
times.  From there, results are patchy.
crypto-fs's are a mixed bag.  Microsoft's (of course) is simple to
crack.  Others are better, but it depends on the implementation.

As for /dev/random, that should work, although I think it would take
longer.  I'm about to wipe some 1TB drives, I'll do some statitics,
although it may prove that USB is the limiting factor on this system.  :(

- --
Matthew Carpenter
matt at eisgr.com                          http://www.eisgr.com/

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