[svlug] Erasing old hard drives

[Robert Citek]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Bill Ward <bill at wards.net> wrote:
> Does anyone know of a tool that I can use to wipe out a hard drive to ensure
> data cannot be recovered from it? I'm thinking something that writes random
> data to every byte on the disk a bunch of times. I have some old drives that
> used to contain personal information that I'd like to donate to e-waste
> recycling but don't want anyone being able to get in there and recover the
> data.

Once you settle on a method to wipe the drive, you might want to
verify that your data is non-recoverable by asking the related
question: how can I recover data from a drive that I have just mangled
with {insert mangling method name}?

For example: how can I recover data from a drive that I have just
mangled with 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' ?

Regards,
- Robert