"bealoid" wrote in message
news:Xns9A5F9A0C852E0YAsfKJXSTO@194.117.143.53...
> Palindrome wrote in news:F%NBj.18028$se7.16142
> @fe11.news.easynews.com:
>
> [snip]
>
>> Depending on the value of the old hard disk, either stick it under the
>> bench drill or wipe it using at least two different secure erase methods.
>
> One single overwrite of all zeros will render the disk unreadable to
> anyone, including well funded law enforcement officials.
>
This has been discused before. Your method would be fine if the replacement
track of all zeros exactly covered the data you were attempting to
overwrite. Unfortunately, it is a fact of the way current hard disc drive
technology works that that is not the case. Your overwriting track, due to
small alignment errors, will leave the original data poking out from
underneath the replacement track. Far better is some utility that makes
multiple overwrites, while repositioning the heads in between writes. This
way the original data can almost certainly be assumed to have been
overwritten.
> Paranoid types, worried about government agencies or alien technology,
> could do several over-writes using pseudo random data.
>
The only safe way to go.
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