Hello, Format, fill with big files (movies) until there will be no space left and format again. If electron microscope guys (probably there are much cheaper ways to read data from disk only twice formatted) will find anything, it will be only data from last copyed files. If electron guys are working for RIAA, you are in trouble because of illegal copyes of movies :>. But you need a working system to do it. There is no other way to properly and safely clean the disk without damage.
Little math lesson: Let say there is an "empty place" on a disk. That's the place, where we write the bite we want to be there. We have a 20G disk. There are 171798691840 "empty places" ( (((20 * 1024) * 1024) * 1024) * 8 = 171798691840 ). If we write a file on disk, we can do it by 5MBps. That means we can fill 41943040 "empty places" in 1 second. If we format a 20G partition with HardDrake, it takes about 20 seconds (I don't remember the correct time). So, if we format a disk (partition placed on entire disk), we are touching only 838860800 "empty places" on the disk and 170959831040 are untouched and containing old data. If we make two different formats (difrent filesystems), we just decrease this number maybe by another 838860800 and that is not enough. IT IS NEED TO TOUCH EVERY SINGLE BITE ON A DISK TO BE SURE THERE IS NOTHING LEFT!!! Touching all bites on 20G disk takes about 68 minutes by speed 5 MBps. Counts are only guesses (I really have no glue about writing speed on a disk, but I thing it is something about 5 MBps. I guess there are really only 60 seconds in each minute and only 1024 bytes in every single MB :>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>). Sorry for bugging you, but it is very simple so I wonder, why is everybody not understanding it with me. :> Tomas Tudja 136 Church Road N17 8AJ London, UK [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hysteria.sk/catcher -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Charlie Mahan Sent: 05 August 2004 04:44 To: Todd Slater; Mandrake Newbie Subject: Re: [newbie] tools for partitioning and formatting hard drive -----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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