Data Destroying Software? (PowerPC)

A

asyork

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I'm planning to sell my old PowerBook, and was wondering if there is any freeware out there to effectively wipe my data. I'm not looking for anything crazy, just to zero out the HD or something along those lines. Then I can either reload the OS for him, or give it to him like that if he wants.

Edit: I'm not opposed to doing this manually with rm -rfP. I just don't know how to wipe the whole drive this way (aka, what I could boot from to do this).

Is there any way to just overwrite once instead of 3 times? I just want to prevent recovery software from picking stuff up. If someone is willing to do more than that for my info, they will be sadly disappointed in my account balance...
 
boot off of your restore discs or an OS X install disc, open disc utility, go to erase, click security options, and select the option you want. depending on how big your drive is, it could take a while.
 
Thanks, I'll start it when I have time to leave the laptop plugged in for the rest of the day :)

Edit: I also need to update my sig sometime with my new MacBook!
 
when i frag 160gb disks with mac os cds it takes about 6 hours or so with 7 pass erase.... i'd do 35 pass if i had a day or so to spare for it. :p
 
If you just do a plain reformat, it will take some determination to retrieve any data from the hard drive. It's not difficult, as such, but it takes someone actually wanting to sacrifice time and/or money to do so. If you do one pass of writing zeroes, it will take more determination. Writing zeroes over the hard drive seven times, and it's pretty much as safe as driving a nail through it. 35 times seems excessive.
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
If you just do a plain reformat, it will take some determination to retrieve any data from the hard drive. It's not difficult, as such, but it takes someone actually wanting to sacrifice time and/or money to do so. If you do one pass of writing zeroes, it will take more determination. Writing zeroes over the hard drive seven times, and it's pretty much as safe as driving a nail through it. 35 times seems excessive.
Click to expand...

With older disks, with larger physical bit representations, latent magnetic charges could be analyzed to retrieve data, between the actual recorded bits. But since we don't use hard drives from 2002, 7 passes is akin to introducing your data to the game of hockey, or Lacrosse. 35 to a bowl of thermite ;)
 
All I want to do is prevent basic data recovery software from pulling info up. If I were just selling an old HD online, I'd do a 35 pass overwrite, but I know this guy actually wants the laptop, and not just my data off of it...

A format that doesn't zero the drive can be recovered very easily for free. One overwrite, and it's going to cost them a lot of money. Writing the same pattern multiple times is not nearly as good as varying the patterns. A specific series of patterns with 35 passes (Gutmann, this is the method Apple's disk utility uses for the 35 pass option) is supposedly the best way to destroy data on any type of magnetic HD because it includes patterns for each type of encoding.

I figured I'd add some potentially useful info to this discussion :). I learned this while trying to research ways to retrieve data off an HD that died. I never got my data back :(
 
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