[KLUG Members] Formatting a drive: Is it clean?

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 12:10 -0500, John Bridleman wrote:
> * Mark Bystry wrote:
> > I have a general question. We have several old pc's here at work that we are going to clean up 
> > (format) and give to our employees for home use if they want them. These are really old pentium II's 
> > that are just hogging up space. At one time, we had some private financial data on a couple of them. 
> > Will formatting alone erase all of this or do I need to "wipe" the drives? I know a majority of 
> > people are not going to be able to get data off of a hard drive but I'd rather be safe than sorry.
> 
> "Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction."
>  - http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Or you can use any LINUX boot/rescue disk and..

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda bs=512

Run it through at least three times.