 |
The Question is:
Hi!
My question is:
How can I erase all of my data from a disk, so
there is no_way_to_recover any data in the future?
Thanks,
Csabesz
The Answer is :
The command INITIALIZE/ERASE does what most would consider an acceptable
job from OpenVMS software -- if the target disk is the system disk, you
will want to boot from the OpenVMS Alpha CD-ROM media or another system
disk in order to use this command.
Those who are a bit more paranoid could worry about bad block revectoring
in the disk hardware, and whether some snippet of the "erased" data might
be retrievable through some extraordinary hardware-level measures. (The
defence against this can involve specialized software or controller-level
tools that repeatedly attempt to write various patterns to each sector on
the disk.)
Those who are truly paranoid would worry about blocks which had actually
been erased being retrieved through highly specialized hardware picking
up residual magnetic flux from the previous contents -- the US NCSC has
a standard on magnetic remanence (part of the "Rainbow Books" series) that
will be of interest. (The only defense against this threat generally
involves grinding and then "slagging" the disk.)
Related discussions include (841), (3926), (4286), (4598), (7320).
|
|
|
|
|
