Baslinux mailing list

[Lee Forrest <lforrestster AT gmail.com>]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 04:12:46AM -0600, James Miller wrote:
> > 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.

The problem with a lot of such tools is that they key into
filesystems, and some of them don't work with journalled
filestystems, etc (like shred).

Simply writing zeros once isn't anywhere near good enough. Random
numbers, at least 25X, and _then_ a 'layer' of zeros would be.
As long as writing was to the disk alone, independent of any
filesystem.

It would take a very long time to do 20 2GB hdds, even with several fast 
computers. 

But if I was those people, I wouldn't accept anything less.

Lee

-- 
BasicLinux: Small is Beautiful
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