govt wipe hdd

some guy told me that if i fdisked the drive 3 times it'd be just like a govt wipe...any truth to that?

 

FDisk does a few things to make data recovery difficult for a novice, but the bulk of the data will be recoverable. You need to employ a rewriter program that will overwrite the data with random data in every sector on all platters. Rewriters will probably do this action 3 times to ensure extreme difficulty to extract the original data.

 

heh kk...had to ask, it didn't sound right. ^_^

 

There's a decent free program I've used that supposedly does a wipe to DOD spec. It's called "Boot and Nuke". Just be warned it will erase all drives connected to a computer so make sure you physically disconnect any other drives from the computer before running it.

 

If you really want the data on a hard drive to be lost forever and ever, just put some absolutely vital information on it and do not keep a backup anywhere.

 

No. At least, I hope not.

All fdisk does is alter the partition table. Essentially, the first sector of the hard drive that contains a list of the partitions on a disk and which one is bootable. Like most "deletion" operations, the computer simply marks used space as free and then it doesn't know there's any data there. But if you have the capability, you can still read the data from the physical media.

To wipe a disk, you need something like DBAN. That contains a 3-pass wipe that complies with the US DoD Quick requirements, and a 7-pass wipe that complies with the US DoD standard requirements. There are other methods (some involving as many as 35 passes) but unless you know why you need them (that is, unless you know the electromechanics of the disk you're using and why you might need a specific algorithm) then either of the DoD or using 4-5 random write passes is sufficient to destroy data on the disk.