On Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:05:33 -0400 "H.S." <hs.sa...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I have a couple of hard disks in a computer which is to be > recycled. I want the windows OS in it to remain functional, but I > want to be sure that I have deleted all my personal files securely > (never used the OS that much anyway and there is hardly any > important info in its registry or browser). There are a number of > documents that were deleted in Windows the usual way (Shift+del) > and I just want to make them unrecoverable. > > Its first and second partitions (sdc1 and sdc2) are vfat. I was > thinking of mounting these on /mnt/scd1 (and scd2) and then doing: > # dd if=/dev/zero > /mnt/sdc1/zeros.bin; rm -f /mnt/sdc1/zeros.bin > > and the same for scd2. The idea is fill the partition with new data > thus overwriting any deleted files' data that is lying around. > Would that be adequate? The objective is just to prevent a casual > recovery, reading and copying of the data by a future user, so I > don't need multiple over-writes.
I suggest dd'ing /dev/zero over the raw disk partition instead. That will zero out every single block of the file system. You can probably just do dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/scd bs=1M or some moral equivalent. -- Perry E. Metzger pe...@piermont.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100715133812.64fb6...@jabberwock.cb.piermont.com