Thomas Cameron wrote:
If you want to securely wipe the drive you can do a couple of things. Have a look here for some commercial solutions. Or you can just boot off of the first FC CD in rescue mode and run the command:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
Once the dd command hits the end of your disk it will end. If you want to *really* scrub your drive, many security experts recommend doing this seven times.
What "many security experts" recommend is overwritting the disk seven times using different specially designed patterns for this purpuse. Overwriting it seven times with zeros using dd isn't going to do it.
An interesting thing to note is that government agencies are not allowed to use this technique to destroy the most sensitive data. This may indicate NSA might have a way of recovering the data that was erased that way. The actuall procedure they use to delete data from the disks is not publically available (my guess is that it includes physical destruction of media).
-- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
