Bulk erased drives

Some new drives run everything in/out of the platters through a block cipher (?). So, you can effectively "erase" the data just by changing the "key".

Note that modern drives are hard to truly obfuscate their contents as the bit density is so high that even grinding/chopping the platters will leave large enough fragments to be imaged! (e.g., I think a sector on a modern drive is like 0.010"; granted, that's just *a* sector but if the drive is full of names, birthdates and SSN's, that's *a* hit for each such imaged sector! :-/ )

Of course, you need to have something truly *worth* stealing for these sorts of Class II and III attacks (I wonder if, nowadays, a Class I attack could be successfully mounted; e.g., using facilities available at a university)

Yes, I have, I think, 5.0 Worked for me in that it marked enough bad sectors to let me read the disk with out timeouts.

Cheers

I have been using Spinrite 6.0 for ages; i thought it came from Gibson. It works on all IDE drives; FAT16, FAT32, extended partitions and NTFS partitions; cannot say regarding Unix-type partitions. Cannot say about SATA drives either. Should i try to get a "demo" SATA for checking? So M$ "stole" Spinrite off the market to prevent users from keeping their drives in good shape as well as preventing one from learning of imminent disaster and recovery. So typical of M$... No wonder why i never heard of an update to 6.0 ..

??? 'dd' ??? Whazzat?

Well, 50 years ago there was the question "what does a lock do?" and the answer was (and is today and in the future) "keep an honest person honest.". Probably the most secure place for information (data) is IN THE PUBLIC (domain). The info being easily available in the public domain essentially makes it worthless or as worthless as any other info - and so not worth the time and/or trouble to find a particular straw in the haystack.

Command line utility on unix-like OS (eg. Linux), dd is a generalised data transfer utility. Example, write zeroes to entire HDD:

# dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M of=/dev/sdd

Decode: # - superuser prompt, if=/dev/zero - input file is endless stream of zeroes, bs=1M - blocksize is 1MB, of=/dev/sdd - output file is a particular HDD treated as one big file; no end condition specified so command runs until output file (the drive) is full.

Grant.

I would have asked for some samples, and said it was just curiosity to see if i could figure out what was done to them. At 80 GB it would not take all that long to do a truly worthwhile grade of wipe. And an industrial chipper would be cheaper than any magnet wiper that powerful. And i have meet people unscrupulous as to just apply labels.

Actually rewriting the servo information may take machinery with different heads.

Pretty much. The original write of servo information requires an alternate path for accurate head positioning.

True, but a new partition table can be easily created, so long as the electronic size data and the magnetic servo data is intact. I have done so many times on erased drives. More than once i used simple tools that inspected the drive and re-created the old partition table.

Robert Baer > No wonder why i never heard of an update to 6.0 ..

I suspect the Microsoft rumor was false.

I think the one I used was Spinrite 1, possibly 2. Very early on with IDE drives, trying to do a LLF outside of the factory was a disaster.

It really looks like they eventually overcame that trouble and progressed to the present day.

To download two videos on it:

V 5.0 documentation - brochure, owner's guide and "What's under the hood"

It's worth the 89 bucks for people fixing systems or people with really important stuff on their hard disks. I'm probably going to have to spring for it.

I wonder what they would do for the next version.

Yep. The current version is 6; available direct from Gibson Research. One google, first hit.

UN*X disk raw read/write utility. Will clone an entire disk, byte-for-byte.

-- "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." (Richard Feynman)

That used to be the case, but the new GPT drives are a bit different I think you'll find.

And "byte-for-byte" is the wrong claim too. Cylinder-for-cylinder or track-for-track is more correct. If you want a copy of a volume, you do not care what the file system is. If the copy is true, it will get carried.

Or even more correct, "block-for-block". The main difference between "dd" and e.g. "cat" is that "dd" specifically reads/writes blocks of a user-defined size. This can matter if the source or destination is a tape drive, where each read/write operation reads/writes one block, padding or truncating the data as necessary.

In many cases "cat /dev/zero > /dev/sdd" will do just as well; the main reason for using dd is that it won't abort on the first error.

But if you want to securely erase a drive, use "hdparm --security-erase". That will overwrite remapped sectors, "hidden" areas, etc, while "dd" will only overwrite the parts which are "visible". The feature is supported on all IDE drives made since ~2001 (at which time the largest available IDE drive was 15GB, so any drive larger than that will support it).

Note the larger the file size, the faster the read or write of that data block (as long as one does not over-run free RAM space with that I/O block). With a measly 1Meg block, it takes LONGER to open the file than to read or write it; try 100Megs or so..

As far as i am concerned, Spinrite is worth its weight in gold- even for a casual user.

If true that is infinitely better than Norton's GhostPE which is supposed to be able to a "forensic" copy, but in fact does not.

That is _still_ better than Norton's Ghost so-called "forensic copy".

dd for windows...

or the win32 image copying utility.