Wiping Out Data

[Felipe Figueiredo]

On Tuesday 27 March 2007 07:10:35 Matthew Flaschen wrote:

 
> That will rewrite the entire drive with gibberish 7 times (this can be
> adjusted).  That should mostly obliterate all data, then reformat the

Is it really different from 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb

? I don't get it, why is it necessary to use random bits, instead of zeroing 
all bytes (including the FATs)?

I did plenty of undeleting and unformating back in DOS days, and I know it's 
not even guaranteed to work fully. 

It mostly (back then, at least) recovered the FAT entry. If data was already 
written over parts of your file, you would give you a corrupted file (which 
in many cases is useless, since proprietary file formats are binary).

Looking forward to some reading pointers.

regards
FF