On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 11:02 PM, mike cloaked <mike.cloaked@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 8:31 PM, Linuxguy123 <linuxguy123@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> I bought a hard drive and wrote a bunch of information to it as an >> external drive only to find that it won't fit in my laptop as an >> internal drive. >> >> How do I absolutely destroy all the data on the drive so that I may >> safely return it to the retailer for a refund ? > > I believe the best way is to use "Secure Erase" which is initiated at > the HD firmware level via an hdparm command in Linux - this allows the > erase to be done by the firmware on the drive itself and once > initiated will prevent access to the drive until it completes. > > https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase By the way I have done this with several disks in the past few months and once complete the disk looks like a brand new clean drive from a data viewpoint. If for some reason you can't run these commands, (which can also be initiated with for example "Ultimate Boot CD") then resorting to DBAN will do a next best job but will take a lot longer! -- mike c -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
