UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

OpenOffice is your friend!

hi, why do we need to clear and sanitiz the hard disk? sorry for my ignorance.

Make sure you have an old DOS boot-floppy with fdisk on it.

Fdisk has an option to remove NON-dos partions, after you removed the partions you can re-use the disk space by create anyhow (NT-diskadministrator, linux-tools) a new partions and create a new filesystem on it.

When the remove action fails, you need more speciliazed tools like norton disk dokter or partion magic.

yls177, experts can often recover some data from deleted files. And it's very hard to completely destroy the data to the point that an expert can recover nothing. There are even commericial companies that offer services like recovering deleted data. A disk is especially hard to wipe clean. When a sector has problems, it is replaced by another sector. This may happen inside the drive and be transparent to the driver. That sector that was taken out of service may still have data and an expert can find a way to read it.

So if you have old disks with classified data on them, destroy them. If you follow janr's advice and tell your Security Officer "Hey don't worry about those old disks, I ran fdisk on them before I sold them on EBAY!", you could literally find yourself behind bars.