Bought a hard drive on ebay and the contents of the drive are all ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

abefroman · 08-13-2005, 03:03 PM

Bought a hard drive on ebay and the contents of the drive are all ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ?

Why am I seeing ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ in all blocks?

makuyl · 08-13-2005, 03:20 PM

Someone has written over to wipe the data. Repartition and format.

Capt_Caveman · 08-13-2005, 03:49 PM

Not a linux - security question. Moving thread to the General forum.

abefroman · 08-13-2005, 04:01 PM

Do you know what program they used to do that?

trickykid · 08-13-2005, 04:03 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by abefroman
Do you know what program they used to do that?

Why would it matter? If you sell a drive and use Linux, doing something like this:

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hdX bs=512

Would wipe the drive of complete randomness, unreadable garbage to remove any data from easily being extracted.