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

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Sharpe, Sam J wrote:
> 2009/5/30 Mikkel L. Ellertson <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com>:
>> Rick Stevens wrote:
>>> I generally take the drives out to the desert and use /sbin/detonate.
>>> As Jamie Hyneman once said on "Mythbusters"...
>>>
>>>     When in doubt....C4!
>>>
>> Can I come with the next time you take one out? They will not let me
>> play with C4 any more. :(
> 
> I've never been "allowed" to play with explosives (I don't live in the
> US). This has not stopped me building up a considerable corpus of
> personal knowledge about them. C4 is not a particularly cheap or easy
> thing to use - if you want to blow things up, take some lessons from
> McVeigh or Kaczynski and use something more common and easy to obtain!
> 
This should probably be taken to another list... But I can not
resist one last comment - low explosives like McVeigh was reported
to have used would probably send the drive flying, rather then
destroying it directly. A shaped charge from C4 will tend to shatter
the drive. You could also use thermite (sp) to melt the drive.

Now, if I have a bunch of drives to erase, I would probably ask
Steve to let me barrow the induction furnace. Between the magnetic
field, and the fact that they would become a puddle, I don't think
any data could be recovered. It would add a few impurities to the
mix, so it probably would have to go in with a load of scrap.

Mike
-- 
Washington DC’s low murder rate of 69 per 100,000
is due to strict gun control.

Indianapolis’ high murder rate of 9 per 100,000
is due to the lack of gun control.

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