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

[Robin Laing]

Rick Stevens wrote:
> Henrik Schmiediche wrote:
>> Check out:
>>
>>  
>>
>> http://www.dban.org
>>
>>  
>>
>> -          Henrik
>>
>>  
>>
>> 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?
>>
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 6:00 PM, Mike McCarty <Mike.McCarty at sbcglobal.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>> 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.

But the point is how much does someone want to spend to recover the 
data.  If you don't have state secrets where noone else has backups, 
then I really doubt anyone will invest the time and money to recover the 
data.

There was a challenge put out to recover data that was erased with dd 
but no takers.  The comment that I read on the web site pointed to a 
phone call that dd makes it to costly to recover.



-- 
Robin Laing