0/Low level format
 

Hi,

As i am using opensuse11.3, i have a another 160GB HDD which has to be formatted in low level.

Mainly its very important to me is when formatted my HDD, no one should be able to recover the data, I heard there are recovery softwres which can get back our data.
so using data recovery software also no one should be able to get data again. Data has to be completely deleted fro HDD.

can anyone tell me how can i do this???

I'd use the dd command along with /dev/random - do it several times over to ensure that the data is completely gone (it can still be retrieved after a single wipe sometimes due to resident magnetic charge left on the drive platters). There is a thread in this forum I believe regarding the dd command - an excellent resource.

You can usewhere ? is to be substituted with the correct character. Be careful not to delete the wrong partition!!!

Markus

Hi

Thankx for the reply. .

I have done format using DD command. I hope all the data has been erased.

Hi,

Thankx for u too. .

I have used the same command as u have mentioned, actually i formatted thrice and i was very careful while doing it. . :)

There are multiple threads around here about this--getting a disk "empty" so no files could be recovered from it--so you might want to look them up as well. The bottom line in them is:
- "formatting" does not help, as is usually means just writing a filesystem on the disk, which does practically nothing to the actual data (so often "file recovery" means just figuring out where on the disk is what, and then creating a working file out of it to a working filesystem)
- the only surefire way is to put the disk into parts (drill, cut, melt, ...) so it's physically not possible to get it working anymore; the bigger the damage, the better the result
- the software way is to overwrite very many times the whole disk, and hope that the result makes the disk contents look random enough to make recovery process so long and difficult that it's practically useless; this is time-consuming and, given the disk prices today, in my opinion useless as well

The thing is, even if your average program can't right away get any data out of your shredded-three-times-over disk, physically there may still be (faint) patterns which can be used to get some of the data back, or make guesses about what there may have been. I think some standards require 10-30 overwrite rounds, but I think it's still only very probable that the contents are "fully erased", not a fact. If you're paranoid, a couple dozen dollars/euros, or even a hundred-something, is a small price to pay for getting a factory-clean disk and trashing the old one to oblivion. Especially after you've tried overwriting a 1TB disk 30 times on a typical home computer configuration :)

There is a command to do what you need, it is called shred. Do a man shred to learn more.

Hello,
shred maybe a good idea, but it handles files, but not partitions or the whole disk. So you don't have any access to files which are already deleted with rm.

As I've understood the OP he wants to get rid of any data which ever have been stored on the disk. This is (referring to the manpage) not possible.

Markus

I'd take a hammer to it. That usually stops the average hacker.

Hi Markush.

Since *nix uses all devices as files, you can erase a device as if it was a file, so

shred -zvn10 --random-source=/dev/random /dev/sda

will write random data to your HD and will repeat the process 10 times, after that it will write 0s on your drive.

See also scrub & dban http://linux.die.net/man/1/scrub

A simple dd with /dev/zero would suffice, unless your enemy works at the NSA and in this case we probably shouldn't be helping you at all. ;)

It's true that, if you know the current status of a bit, it's relatively easy to know the previous one (provided the current you use to change it is a constant). That's maths. But in a disk there are maybe billions of bits (thousands of millions of bytes), and the fact that a bit changed doesn't mean the next one has also changed, in other words: you can't be sure what bit pattern to choose, you can only look at a single bit each time and then try to make out of it something that makes any sense, which is complicated because to start with you don't even know if you are inside the position of a meaningful file of any kind or in the middle of an "empty" area of the disk surrounded by random crap. This is a work that takes not only specialized hardware (that alone would sort out the average joe from spying you) but also a lot of manual work, time, money, and a huge exercise in logic.

When all the paranoid crew in the net talks about this they usually forget that they are talking about what's physically possible in theory, over the papers. But that's one thing, and the real world and the limited lifetime of a human being makes it practically impossible; unless you have all the technology and money it takes at your hands, and you are seeking truly worthwhile information.

That probably means that you are as safe rewriting with /dev/zero as you would be if you disintegrated your HD with a LASER beam.