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  • From: "Samual Acorn" <sam.acorn AT gmail.com>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] hd problem
  • Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 02:40:16 -0600

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
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