Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

> On 25/02/05, sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
> >
> > 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?

Take a look at DBAN (Daric's boot and nuke), a Linux boot floppy that offers 
several 
"official" options for erasing data from hard drives. Maybe show these people 
the web 
page ( http://dban.sourceforge.net/ ) to help convince them that it will 
really remove 
the data effectively.

James