At 1:33 PM -0500 7/27/05, Mike McCarty wrote: ... >I have since gotten an external USB drive, and put all subsequent >stuff belonging to them on it. They paid for that, and so I can >just return that. But it also has some of my stuff on it, which >I'd like to wipe. Obviously, I cannot hammer their drive. But if >I just buy an identical one, and copy either their stuff or my >stuff to it, then I'm still stuck with how to erase the data >on one of the drives. When you have the two identical USB drives, tar up your stuff, set the tarball aside on your main drive, delete that stuff, and copy their stuff to the new drive. Erase the old drive, copy their stuff back to the old drive, and send it to them. Erase the new drive and unpack your tarball to it. Note that by "erase" I speak of a low-level format operation. ____________________________________________________________________ TonyN.:' <mailto:tonynelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> ' <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>