Wiping donated computers for recycling question

[Jonathan D. Proulx]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 02:50:55PM -0500, Intense Red wrote:
: > Does the standard installation process where one selects
: > 'Use entire disk' do a good enough job of wiping the hard drive of any
: > prior data?
:
:   IMHO, yes. A lot will depend on the particular file system you use and 
:how paranoid you are, but here's a generic answer.

I'd agree a reinstall is "good enough"

:   GNU fdisk will reset the master boot record. At that time, the partition 
:data on the disk is effectively lost, and similarly the data. But it would 
:still be possible for an expert to recover the data.

if you stop at this stage it would be good enough to keep someone from
accidentally seeing what was on there but a 12yo with google could
figure out how to get it back in 2 or 3 easy steps

new filesystems woudl als a could more fairly easy steps, but once you
start actually writting all the files a new operating system would
take up it becomes reasonably difficult.

I'd become more paranoid if it included "valuable" information like
social security numbers, credit card info etc ... but it probably
didn't.