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Hi,
I have been preparing old machines for end of lifecycle disposal and have been testing out wiping drives with DBan Boot Nuke which uses DoD standards for erasing/overwriting.
I want to find some app/boot disk that I can use to test that everything has been wiped as it should/could be...any ideas?
TIA
INSERT and NTS live cd's both have software to rebuild deleted files.
spazz has the right idea. Try to recover something. File dismemberment is a vague art. How disfigured is disfigured enough? If you can recover anything that resembles what was on the drive before, you're not getting rid of everything. However, if the software truly is DoD compliant, I don't believe (aside from a hardware error during the wipe) that any data readable by a computer survived. The multipass DoD standard usually makes even electron scan microscope analysis difficult. It all depends on just how sensitive the data is and the resources available to those who want it.
After the DoD wipe:
My minimum suggestion: write all zeros to it (in linux) dd if=/dev/zeros of=/dev/hda [or whatever your drive is] then cat /dev/hda [or whatever drive] if anything shows up on the screen from the cat, theres still something easily readable on the drive. if nothing shows up, more than likely if the drive is in a computer, no data can be retrieved aside from a few non printable characters.
My medium/high suggestion: disassemble the drive and place a very powerful magnet directly on each side of each patter two or three times.
My maximum suggestion: Inceneration. Ashes tell no stories.
Again, how persistent is your enemy?
NOTE: If you work for the government, the NSA will accept your drives and will destroy the data for you if you call them and make sure it meets their specs.
or, if they are IDE drives, short circuit the IDE controller. Aslong as its dont right ( using couple thousand volts an amps :P ) the data will not be recoverable.
However, with SCSI drives, you can just grab the spindles and place them in another case, IDE drives you cannot.
Perhaps using that to your advantage ?