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

[Wolfgang S. Rupprecht]

"Mikkel L. Ellertson" <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com> writes:
> 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.

McVeigh used ANFO, a common and cheap high explosive used for road work,
by farmers to remove boulders etc.  The wiki article does claim the
propagation velocity of the explosion is faster than the speed of sound.
That would make it a high explosive.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANFO

As for decommissioning a drive with secrets on it, I have no idea if it
is a good choice.  dd-ing /dev/zero over the raw partition works well
enough for me, but then I don't need to clear my drives in only a few
milliseconds.

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht              Android 1.5 (Cupcake) and Fedora-11