Re: simple way to securely destroy deleted files in a file system
On Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:05:33 -0400 "H.S." <hs.samix@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have a couple of hard disks in a computer which is to be
> recycled. I want the windows OS in it to remain functional, but I
> want to be sure that I have deleted all my personal files securely
> (never used the OS that much anyway and there is hardly any
> important info in its registry or browser). There are a number of
> documents that were deleted in Windows the usual way (Shift+del)
> and I just want to make them unrecoverable.
>
> Its first and second partitions (sdc1 and sdc2) are vfat. I was
> thinking of mounting these on /mnt/scd1 (and scd2) and then doing:
> # dd if=/dev/zero > /mnt/sdc1/zeros.bin; rm -f /mnt/sdc1/zeros.bin
>
> and the same for scd2. The idea is fill the partition with new data
> thus overwriting any deleted files' data that is lying around.
> Would that be adequate? The objective is just to prevent a casual
> recovery, reading and copying of the data by a future user, so I
> don't need multiple over-writes.
I suggest dd'ing /dev/zero over the raw disk partition instead. That
will zero out every single block of the file system. You can probably
just do
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/scd bs=1M
or some moral equivalent.
--
Perry E. Metzger perry@piermont.com
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