"Chris Lambacher" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > The reason they are slow and tedious is that they need to write to > every byte on the disk. Depending on the size of the disk, there may > be a lot of data that needs to be written, and if they are older > computers, write speed may not be particularly fast.
I would expect programs called killdisk, autoclave, etc to not only write every byte multiple times, but to also work at the lowest level to try to manipulate track alignment to wipe out any residual signals off the current tracks. That is *really* slow. (Note: the ultimate security is to shread or incenerate the disk platters. I believe this is now standard practice in super security areas.) OP: if you merely want to wipe the data enough to protect against a casual user, using casual access thru normal open and read, and not the FBI disk forensics/recovery lab (;-), one write would be enough. On *nix, one could open '/dev/rawdisk' (actual name depends on the *nix build) and write a tracks worth of garbage for as many tracks as there are. I don't how to programmaticly get the track size and number (if there is a standard way at all). For Windows, you would need the appropriate low-level system call, but I have no idea what it is or if it is the same for different versions. Same for other non *nix systems. Terry J. Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
