RE: OT: Can Reformatting A Hard Drive To ext3 Destroy All the Data On It?

[Stuart Munro]

Bob

I have used this utility before with good success 
http://www.soft32.com/download_191651.html

I have used this one with greater success 
http://www.killdisk.com/?gclid=CKatoNLX4JoCFQENDQodO0xTAQ

both are free utilities

-----Original Message-----
From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]]
On Behalf Of Gene Heskett
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 10:54 PM
To: Community assistance, encouragement, and advice for using Fedora.
Subject: Re: OT: Can Reformatting A Hard Drive To ext3 Destroy All the Data
On It?

On Thursday 28 May 2009, Robert L Cochran wrote:
> I have a hard drive that I need to destroy the data on. What is the most
> dependable way to do this? Can reformatting the drive as ext3 or ext4 or
> some other filesystem effectively destroy the existing data?
>
> Is there free software that can write zeroes or some form of nonsense to
> every storage location?

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/(ice) repeated 3 or so times should pretty well 
destroy any attempts to recover any valid data from that drive.  Don't use
the 
partition, such as /dev/sda1, but the whole drive, /dev/sda which should
also 
get the partition tables.

Formatting a hard drive just installs a new inode framework and root 
directory.  The data itself is still there for something as simple as:
dd if=/dev/sdX
which will spit it all out to the screen with only the holes created by the 
installation of a new filesystem framework being invalid.

But /dev/urandom written to everything 3 or more times should render the
data 
unrecoverable unless they wanna call out the guys with the electron 
microscopes to read the edges of the track byte by byte.
> Thanks
>
> Bob Cochran