Tim,

I am a little confused as to what exactly you are asking for here.  Are you
looking for a way to format a drive that will not keep the previous
formatting?  Or, was there sensitive data that you want to make sure can
never be recovered?  For the former, I believe there is a switch that lets
you do an unconditional format with the regular format command (I can't
remember what it is - one of the listers here should know it).  For the
latter you need a little bit stronger formatting.

The Department of Defense can apparently still retrieve data off of a hard
drive that has been formatted and reformatted over forty times.  If they can
do it, it's a sure bet that there are others who can.  I work at a hospital,
and one of the major IT issues we have is patient confidentiality.  If we
are surplusing a machine that even has the possibility of having sensitive
patient data on it we must conform to certain regulations when it comes to
the recoverability of that data.

We use a program called DOD Wipe.  The program condenses down to a single
bootable floppy, and it works on any hard drive.  It writes an F6, I
believe, to every sing hex block on the drive.  It does this a total of
three times.  Why three?  Because that's considered the minimum for
"sensitive" data.  If it were "secret" or "top secret" data the rules would
require more writes.

I hope this answers your questions.  If you would like to find out more
about the program we use, feel free to contact me off-list.

Kyle Elmblade
[log in to unmask]

From: "Tim Turay" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2000 8:25 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Hard Drive Formatting


> I am looking for utilities that can guarantee me that the hard drive will
be formatted.  So that when you try to use a recover utility you will not be
able to find anything on the hard drive.
>
> So far I have:
>
<<snip>>
>
> Any ideas whould be great,
>
> thanks

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