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

[Rick Stevens]

Henrik Schmiediche wrote:
> Check out:
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> http://www.dban.org
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> 
> -          Henrik
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>  
> 
> From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com]
> On Behalf Of Fernando Cassia
> Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 2:51 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?
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> On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 6:00 PM, Mike McCarty <Mike.McCarty at sbcglobal.net>
> wrote:
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> 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?

shred (man shred) will do it.  "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" would do
it.  Not that none of these guarantee that a disk will be unreadable.
Not even commercial programs.

No matter how many times you rewrite the media, someone with equipment
sophisticated enough may be able to read the data.  The only way to
ensure that a drive is unreadable is to physically destroy the platters.
Scraping off the magnetic coating into a fine dust is probably the
best...it would be possible, given enough time, to reconstruct a
shattered platter.
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> I haven´t done this task from Linux, but if you´ve got access to a windows
> computer (or VM)  and you can install the drive into an external USB
> enclosure, use this GPL program
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/
> 
> FC
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