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Wipe that hard drive before you give it away;

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Old January 15th, 2003, 10:01 PM   Digg it!   #1 (permalink)
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Wipe that hard drive before you give it away;

it's still full of goodies that almost anyone can retrieve. (But you knew that already, didn't you? Didn't you?)
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Old January 15th, 2003, 10:10 PM     #2 (permalink)
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One word...ERASER.
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Old January 15th, 2003, 10:13 PM     #3 (permalink)
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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.
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Old January 16th, 2003, 10:54 AM     #4 (permalink)
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same basic article can also be found at http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/0....ap/index.html
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Old January 16th, 2003, 11:06 AM     #5 (permalink)
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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!
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Old January 16th, 2003, 11:09 AM     #6 (permalink)
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sledge hammer

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Old January 16th, 2003, 11:14 AM     #7 (permalink)
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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...
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Old January 16th, 2003, 11:41 AM     #8 (permalink)
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Anyone??
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Old January 16th, 2003, 11:52 AM     #9 (permalink)
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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??

Last edited by crouse : January 16th, 2003 at 11:56 AM.
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Old January 16th, 2003, 12:04 PM     #10 (permalink)
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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
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