On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 9:05 AM, 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.
This makes sense to me. As you said dd'ing the partition will blank
everything including Windows. Alternatively, if you know of a directory you
want everything inside shredded with zeros, you can use:
# find -type f -execdir shred -vfzu -n 0 '{}' \;
# rm -rf *
HTH.
Mark
