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["Samual Acorn" <sam.acorn AT gmail.com>]

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hd? (forgot the exact procedure but you need
to specify disk length... i think... you'll need to look that one up)
then a zero wipe dd if=/dev/zero .... would result in -complete-
destruction of the data without destroying the drive... make sure to
use the device name and not the partition name so that partition and
all are wiped...

if they are really paranoid there are plenty of freeware DoD
(department of defence) style disk wipers out there...

to prove it to them you can use the 'dd' method on a floppy with plain
text files on it then use a program like anadisk (or dd piped through
cat -v) to show that the data on the disk is little more than binary
junk... floppies take less time so the demo would be quicker...

scsi should be the same but -dont- rely on that until you get a second
opinion...

On 25/02/05, sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
> I need to corrent something I posted - the Seagate Disk Manager does do
> more than partition. The next Seagate drive I tried to use had no
> partition table either.  DM let me 'restore MBR from backup' which took
> about a second, instead of needing to low-level format (which DM also
> does).  I then partitioned with BL2 floppy disk fdisk in another 30 sec or
> so (instead of 30 min with PQMagic).
>
> DM will zero fill and Seagate says this destroys 100% of data.
> They have an option to zero-fill just the partition table, faster.
>
> Our local bbs is about to destroy 20 or so 2GB drives in order to destroy
> data on them and I am trying to convince them that a zero fill would take
> longer but permit the drives to be reused.  Anyone want to help by
> explaining how this works?  It would be a complete zero-fill, not just the
> partition table.  The people who made the decision are a nurse and someone
> who makes a living recording conferences for TV, and they insist that
> 'wiping out the data and rewriting' will not destroy the data.  I
> understand that deleting files does not really make them unrecoverable but
> can one recover a file overwritten with zeros?
>
> The Seagate website says zero fill takes several hours - dd took 40 min on
> 3GB.  Does Seagate simply expect the drives to be larger?  Or do they do
> it differently or better?  They also said to use the Seagate zero fill
> utility for Seagate drives - will dd not accomplish the same thing?
>
> Can I do scsi drives as of=/dev/sda if I find a scsi cable?
>
>
>
>
> keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
> SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
> _______________________________________________
> BasLinux mailing list
> BasLinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux


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