26 Oct
2005
26 Oct
'05
2:47 p.m.
I've got a DEC Alpha system that I can grab from
work but not until I
clean off the hard drives.
The question is: how do I clean the drives completely
without any
real chance of data being recovered?
Depends on what kind of adversary you're trying to defeat.
If you don't care about someone opening the drive up in a cleanroom and
using an atomic force microscope or its ilk on the platters, just write
something meaningless (all zeros, for example) over the whole drive.
If you do, buy a new drive and melt or vaporize the old one (thermite,
plasma torch, whatever).
I don't really know VMS and I'm not sure what
versions are available,
etc.
You don't need to stick to VMS; for example, you could boot the NetBSD
install floppies/CD and then shell out to, eg, dd /dev/zero onto the
disk.
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