[Toccatexx]

Hello

thiws is a HW/SW question

I have a GW B&W id like to completely clean off so no 5 yo hacker can find old files on it so I can donate it to a school.

Id like to re-partition the HD to have two partitions: X and 9

I have a G4 dual with the CD's set up that came withg it.
\
Will these work for setting this up on the G3? some people thought that the particular OS's on these CD's work only on the Dual ( mine is a dual 1GHz)

and will a new partition/formatting completely make the stuff on it impossible to retrieve?

thanks toca

[bradoesch]

In order to completely get rid of whatever was on the drive, you'll need to write new information overtop of it. OS 9's Drive Setup had the option to write 0s to the drive when formatting, which should make the data unrecoverable. When you do a regular format, you're not really erasing anything, just the record of where your files were kept.
Some people here will likely say even writing 0s to the drive won't erase the data.

[tooki]

To protect it from NSA data-recovery agents, you'd want to use a scrambling utility that writes RANDOM data all over the drive, repeatedly.

But to protect it from a young kid, zeroing the data should be more than enough.

Heck, even a normal format is pretty destructive... any chance of recovering data is with a utility that will sit there for *hours*, far long enough for an adult at the school to intervene.

OS X's Drive Utility has the option to zero the drive as well. I think they added it back in some revision of 10.2.

tooki

[bradoesch]

Originally posted by tooki:
To protect it from NSA data-recovery agents, you'd want to use a scrambling utility that writes RANDOM data all over the drive, repeatedly.

I'm just curious here, but what's the difference between writing 0s and writing random data? Each should overwrite the old data, correct? Or is there a way to recover data that's already been overwritten?