The military (at least in Sweden) bakes a Trotyl / Pentyl cake with the drives as stuffing, don't know if that would change the magnetic properties but most likely make the process of collecting/organizing the pieces of the same drive quite labourious.
I read an article on encasing your drives with Magnesium and Aluminium-Oxide and hook it up to the power supply through some programmable circut to remotely melt your drives, this would create a plasma at some 3000+ Celcius. Cant seem to find it again though... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exothermic_reaction - yo-han On 6/1/05, Nick Holland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Shane J Pearson wrote: > > Hi Anthony, > > > > On 01/06/2005, at 4:01 PM, Anthony Roberts wrote: > > > >> The 'dd' way is good enough unless someone is willing to to tear the > >> drive apart in a lab. > > > > I think this depends on how you use dd though. If you just do a single > > pass of zeroes, but fear someone will mount a multi million dollar > > electron microscope forensic analysis, then yeah, that might not be > > enough. But write from /dev/urandom with dd multiple times to the disk > > and you should be okay even with that extreme case. > > > > If I were worried about open-drive analysis of the drive I want to > > clean, then I'd be physically destroying the drive also. Put it in a > > kiln, get the oxy torch into it, etc. > > If loading the drives with a single pass of zeros isn't good enough for > your application, forget /dev/urandom or multiple passes or any other > technique, and just physically destroy the drive. If you are really > concerned someone might extract data after a zeroing of the drive, > handing the drive over to anyone else in usable form is just silly. > > > A while back, I modified an OpenBSD boot CD so it would do exactly this > -- upon boot, it would dd /dev/zero over the first two wd devices, and > the first two sd devices. No prompt, no warning, nothing. Boot the > disk, kiss your data goodbye. It was designed to quickly and reasonably > securely render the data on a bunch of old computers inaccessable with > minimal intervention, before removing them from the donator's office. > All the tools are on the boot CDs (and floppies) already. > > It turned out that when doing 4G IDE drives, I could have about four > machines wiping at the same time in a non-ideal setting, by the time the > fourth one was started, the first one was done. > > I labeled it in big, scary print, and try to keep track of where it is. > So far, it has only claimed one innocent system by accident ("Hey, why > is this machine booting OpenBSD...Oh sh*t..dang, too late") > > Nick.
