Re: Complete Wiping of a hard drive

I made a bootable CD from SuperRescue ( 
ftp://kernel.org/pub/dist/superrescue/v2 )
many months ago.  I boot from it, execute,

   dd  if=/dev/zero   of=/dev/sda   bs=1M

and then go get a cup of coffee.  I imagine Knoppix could do the same thing.

(Note -- /dev/sda is a SCSI drive specifier, you'll probably need to use 
/dev/hdx
where x is a, b, c, or d.)



Richard Steffens wrote:

> A friend of mine got a new computer and will be giving her old one to 
> another friend of hers. She wants to make sure that all her old data 
> is deleted, and bought a program (it's a Win98 machine) and tried to 
> do it herself. (I don't know which tool she bought.) Since she 
> couldn't get it to work, she called me.
>
> Since this machine will be starting over from scratch, wouldn't it be 
> sufficient for most purposes to delete the partition(s) on the drive 
> and do a fresh install, which would include formatting? I know that 
> someone with sophisticated equipment could probably get old data from 
> that drive even after repartitioning and formatting, but the average 
> user probably wouldn't even know to look.
>
> Am I right, or am I missing something important?
>