[TriLUG] HD Block Size (newbieish question)

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2003-07-28 at 17:27, Joseph Tate wrote:
> More secure (if you're paranoid).  Military grade disk wiping does 3-5 
> passes of random data writing.  Evidently some evidence still remains 
> after writing a zero what its original value was.  This evidence might 
> not be legible by standard mechanisms, but if someone wants it badly 
> enough could determine it.  For handing a disk off to a friend, 
> /dev/zero would probably be just fine.

If you're paranoid, even this isn't going to be enough.  Modern drives
regularly do bad sector remapping on the fly at the firmware level
before it ever gets to the OS.  So if you've had any bad sectors on your
drive (and you do :), then there will still be data on those sectors
that can be recovered.

Jeremy