The Great Zero Challenge

[Peter Sommer]

Mary Hawking wrote:
>
> Data erasure programs seem to be both inefficient and expensive!

You don't need to use dd, which is a command-line unix facility.   You 
can't use a Unix/Linux machine with dd on it to wipe a Windows machine 
because there would need to be some sort of network or serial connection 
between the two - and which would get deleted and therefore be 
inoperable before the disk wiping was completed.

 There are plenty of free disk wiping programs around:

eg Eraser:  http://www.heidi.ie/node/6;,  Darin's Boot and Nuke:  
http://www.dban.org/ ;  Secure Delete: 
http://www.objmedia.demon.co.uk/freeSoftware/secureDelete.html    plus 
many more if you a google among the lines of: "data wiping free download"

You'll see that there are two classes of file wiping software,  those 
that undertake to wipe a disk in its entirety and those that over-write 
unused portions of the disk plus wiping things like the Internet cache,  
the Recycle Bin, swap files etc.

The general view is that you only need to one wiping run run rather than 
the several specified by US DoD because disk tracks are now so narrow 
and disk heads so accurate that there is no realistic scope for reovery 
by means of data remanance.

The wiki article on tihis subject is not too bad a 
start...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_remanence


Peter Sommer





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Peter Sommer
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