OT: Can Reformatting A Hard Drive To ext3 Destroy All the Data On It?
Alan Cox
alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk
Fri May 29 08:15:44 UTC 2009
On Thu, 28 May 2009 22:29:23 -0400
Robert L Cochran <cochranb at speakeasy.net> wrote:
> I have a hard drive that I need to destroy the data on. What is the most
> dependable way to do this?
Thermite ?
> Can reformatting the drive as ext3 or ext4 or
> some other filesystem effectively destroy the existing data?
No
> Is there free software that can write zeroes or some form of nonsense to
> every storage location?
That isn't completely guaranteed. Modern drives have a security erase
command which I think some tools like hdparm can issue as shipped nowdays
More information about the fedora-list
mailing list