It depends on what you want to do with the drive afterwards and how paranoid you are. If you do NOT want to use the drive again, swirl a Really Big Magnet around both the top and bottom of the drive and then hit it repeatedly with a sledgehammer and/or axe until it is in many pieces, then dispose of properly.

If you want to use the drive again, the best approach is to be able to read the drive first so that the geometry matches prior to the wipe. This way you are writing patterns over data and not Inter-record gaps (IRGs) or between tracks (ITGs). You might be able to get away with using a magnet here too, but it is risky since it will most likely magnetize parts of the drive :-(

Hope this helps,
-Ben

-----Original Message from Eric Richardson-----
Hi,

I took an old drive from a Mac(not working) and would like to make sure 
the files are not readable. I have the drive in a x86 box running Debian 
Linux box with a  2.4.8 kernel but the drive is HFS+(MacOS X)which is 
not supported until 2.6 or by patching and compiling 2.4. I don't really 
want to do that because I just got it all working for a firewall box.

Could I just format the drive and then use wipe on the device such as 
/dev/hdb1 and will that work or do the files need to be readable?

Reading the man page for wipe on Debian stable (version 0.15) leads me 
to think it is better to wipe a drive where the files are readable.

Any recommendations are welcome including good options to use with wipe 
and the best method to format the drive or other approaches etc.

Thanks,
Eric
---------------------------------------------------
PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change  you mail settings:
http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss