On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 9:05 AM, 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.
This makes sense to me. As you said dd'ing the partition will blank everything including Windows. Alternatively, if you know of a directory you want everything inside shredded with zeros, you can use:
# find -type f -execdir shred -vfzu -n 0 '{}' \;
# rm -rf *
HTH.
Mark