Wipe that hard drive before you give it away;

[Theophylact]

it's still full of goodies that almost anyone can retrieve. (But you knew that already, didn't you? Didn't you?)

[M_Six]

One word...ERASER.

[Xeroid]

I just read that same article on Cnet.com. It was interesting the things that they were able to glean off peoples old hard drives.

[DVNT1]

same basic article can also be found at http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/0....ap/index.html

[dunbar]

IMO, the problem resides more with user perception.

Even if every user knew how to get rid of such files, and knew how to do so in a thorough and complete fashion, they still might not bother with even a single click disk wiper... they tend to think nobody would bother with such efforts as these people put forth.

Corporate 'Information Technology' people are the same way - some have have handed me older drives which still booted, I was the one who had to erase them!

[brucecampbell]

sledge hammer

SEARS $19.95

[crouse]

A quote from the artical DVNT1 posted:

"The only sure way to erase a hard drive is to "squeeze" it: writing over the old information with new data -- all zeros, for instance -- at least once, but preferably several times. A one-line command will do that for Unix users, and for others, inexpensive software from companies such as AccessData works well. "

QUESTION !!! What is that 1 line unix command??

Just for future reference...

[crouse]

Anyone??

[crouse]

http://dfarq.homeip.net/index.php?p=751&c=1

The above link is an EXCELLENT artical

BTW.......... I found the command
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda




[edit]
Upon further reflection .......... Couldn't you boot Knoppix ......... and use that command above....... instead of using the diskette talked about in the above artical??

[woodbutcher]

I wipe zero's to the drive when I do any reinstall (about once a year).
Simple and free utility from the drive manufacture.
Always thought that once would be enough, though.

WB