[ale] Need an iso to wipe hard drives.

[scott boss]

A friend of mines wife wiped her mac laptop HD.  Not the govt 35pass
but a single pass wipe.  He sent it off to one of those disk recovery
companies and he got 99% of the disk back and the HD was much larger
than 20g.  She had over 20g of photos alone.

Ymwv!!

Sent from my mobile...

On Apr 16, 2010, at 12:04, Brian Pitts <brian at polibyte.com> wrote:

> On 04/16/2010 11:31 AM, Greg Freemyer wrote:
>>
>> NIST has a sanitation paper that says disk drives of 20GB or larger
>> capacity are not recoverable even via laboratory means after a single
>> wipe with zero's.
>>
>> So your just wasting cpu cycles using /dev/urandom.  Just use
>> /dev/zero.  And just do it once.
>
> The link you shared to a discussion of that paper a while back is
> dead.
> Do you know of any more sources? I'd really like to have something to
> wave at the "you must wipe it 27 times" people.
>
>> Also, ext2/3 reserves x% of the drive for root, so if your doing the
>> above as a normal user, your missing that x%.  I think x% is 5%,
>> but I
>> don't recall for sure.  And 5% of 1TB is 50GB, so it is a big deal.
>
> At Free IT Athens, we run sfill and sswap from the secure-delete suite
> of tools as a post-install action to securely erase all unused space
> on
> a system being refurbished. sfill sipes the disk space and inode
> space,
> and sswap takes care of the swap partition.
>
> --
> All the best,
> Brian Pitts
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