Re: ByteWorks, FLOSS, and refurbishing machines

["Robert G. (Doc) Savage" <dsavage@peaknet.net>]

On Mon, 2006-06-19 at 09:30 -0500, asouza@siu.edu wrote:
> Hello all-
> 
> I am actually in the process of wiping computers for my company
> to be donated to a local elementary school. I am interested in 
> actually double checking that our hard-drives do not contain any
> recoverable data. I am using a utility that uses the  DoD
> 5220.22-M 7 pass 1 verify method for wiping disks. 
> 
> What do you recommend for verifying that all the data has been
> erased? Is there a certain boot-able distro that specializes in
> data recovery? 
> 
> Besides just trying to mount /dev/hda, I am not very linux savvy-
> so some commands would also be appreciated for trying to recover
> data from a wiped hard disk.

Aaron,

If your company can afford to spend $280 you can buy a hardware solution
that will meet all your needs (and many more). See
http://www.corpsys.com/store/prodinfo.asp?number=SDIPROB&variation=&aitem=1&mitem=3. I have a portable version of this box and swear by it.

It does have a few limitations:
- It can handle EIDE drives only up to 125GB. (EIDE drives now range up
to 700GB.)
- It supports EIDE and SCSI interfaces (50-pin narrow on the latter),
but not SATA. Inexpensive EIDE-SATA adapters overcome this.
- It doesn't support drives with FibreChannel interfaces.

There are rumors of a new and improved model that addresses these
limits, but details aren't yet available.

This box is the only way to low-level format the vast majority of EIDE
and SCSI drives, including those in notebooks. More than that, it can
then "re-certify" a drive by testing all sectors on the drive and
mapping out the bad ones. If you have a hard drive that's developed bad
spots -- especially in places that interfere with booting -- this box
can safely replace those bad sectors with good ones.

It's not fast, but it's completely self-contained and menu driven. It
takes about 25 hours to do a full DoD 5220-20M erasure on an 18GB drive
followed by a re-certification. When those two passes are complete
you've got what amounts to a factory-new drive, except for having
several hundreds of hours on the spindle bearings, ready to be
partitioned and formatted.

Hope this helps.

--Doc



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