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

[James Kosin]

Tim wrote:
> Tim: 
>>> But do you know what the drive does when you use that function?  ;-\
> 
> Bruno Wolff III: 
>> Reading the drive back in should give you a good idea. If that isn't enough
>> of a check for you then you should just be destroying the drive.
> 
> While that would tell you that *you* couldn't read your own drive back,
> it doesn't tell you whether someone else could.  In the paranoid
> security concious arena, you'd need to know exactly how their secure
> erase function works, before you could trust it.
> 
Unfortunately, the only way to guarantee complete security is to
completely destroy the drive.

Writing 0-zeros or other data may still leave ghost trails a really good
expert (say with government connections and the proper hardware) could
still read back.

James

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