Re: how to sweep hard disk of confidential data
Hello
Philipp Weis (<pweis@pweis.com>) wrote:
> On 18 Jul 2004, H. S. <greatexcalibur@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I am in a situation where a computer is to be given away and prior to
>> that it's hard disk needs to *thoroughly* cleaned (data consists of
>> financial information, reports, class exams, competition exams, etc).
>
> Wipe was designed for this. It repeatedly writes certain patterns and
> random data to your disk, so that a recovery of the original data is
> almost (?) impossible. Versions prior to 0.20 have problems with disks
> larger than 4GB, so be sure to use a recent version.
As far as I know this does not work reliably with journaled file systems
like ext3. And you probably want to remove everything including and
file system data, so overwriting the complete disk (e.g. /dev/hdb)
using /dev/zero or /dev/urandom as input woule be better.
best regards
Andreas Janssen
--
Andreas Janssen <andreas.janssen@bigfoot.com>
PGP-Key-ID: 0xDC801674 ICQ #17079270
Registered Linux User #267976
http://www.andreas-janssen.de/debian-tipps.html
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