-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On August 4, 2004 21:11:09, Todd Slater wrote: > I'm auctioning some hard drives and I want to wipe them and format them. > I had all kinds of trouble creating boot floppies for some reason--even > though no errors were reported I couldn't boot them. I ended up having > success with making a bootable cd. > > So I'm using autoclave to wipe the hard drive; is there a linux-based > tool (bootable floppy or cd) I can use to format the hd? What flavor > should I format it as? Do I need anything other than fdisk? > > Todd
Most of the manufacturers have their own utilities package for formatting and diagnosing their drives. For example Maxtor has their "Max Blast" that's available as an ISO that burns fine under Mandrake and the resulting CD includes Dr-DOS to run on. With that tool you can even do a "deep format" to totally randomize the drives but be careful with that! I found some old drives don't take too well to this procedure, plus it's very time consuming. I'm fairly sure all the other manufacturers have similar tools but lately I haven't had to bother looking. So that memory has been flushed. (-: For hard drives that I'm not terribly worried about any forensic analysis being applied I usually just slave them to a working Linux install and format them, then change the file system type to something other than what was there originally and format them again. By the time the next OS is booted and formats to load on that drive the chances of any of your data still being susceptible to anything less than a tunnelling/scanning electron microscope or other *very expensive* tools are probably slim. I could be wrong but probably not. Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid _enough?_ I've also used Knoppix or PCLinuxOS (livecd distributions) to do the deed when I was in a hurry. Lots of tools, just pick what's easiest for you. Good luck; Charlie - -- Edmonton,AB,Canada User #244963 at http://counter.li.org Mandrakelinux release 10.1 (Beta 1) for i586 kernel 2.6.8-0.rc2.2mdk 21:29:16 up 2:09, 1 user, load average: 0.23, 0.31, 0.23 God is dead and I don't feel all too well either.... -- Ralph Moonen -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFBEa0RZqvqlrLPr5YRAin3AJ0W598FnH66NRS0FJ6Hoz9DIjFg+gCeNanj sXJd2meO/G+b+9SQEFzeorY= =PSK6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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