formatting a hard drive to military standard

I may be wrong but it looks like a complete scam to me. C:\format or deleting a partition will erase everything, you cannot "study patterns" on the disk surface to gain any kind of translatable file data.
 
trust me just doing a format! or deleting a partition, will not i mean NOT erase all the data, why do you think banks want data erased in the proper manner, ie, to government standard, have you even read peter gutmans paper?
 
Yes, indeed trust him!
There are several methods people thinks are safe for getting rid of data.

1st FDISK
FDISK is a disk partitioning tool, the only part of the Disk FDISK affects is the partition table, using Fdisk will only tell a computer that there is no partition, all data will be left intact.

2nd Format. (high level / quick format)
The only thing a quick format does is erase the first bit of each block on the disk.

o roove y oint, 'm ure ou an uess hat his s eant o ay

(to proove my point I'm sure you can guess what this is meant to say)

3rd Format (low level / disk zero)
All the bits on the disk are reset to a set value. (zero) and all data on the disk is lost...
however...
the disk is made up of magnetic particles, each particle sits in a particular domain, (the way it is facing eithe 1 or 0), you'll know that if you leave a screw driver next to a magnet for a long time then the screw driver becomes magnetic...
the same thing happens with the disk, the disk surface begins to adhere to the domain on the data layers, thus when a disk is low level formatted sometimes the bits can start to re-align them selves back totheir old domains,
to get around this there is the standard 5 swipe zero, all the bits are written to 1, then all the bits are written to 0, 5 five times.
This is pretty secure and helps to eliminate the residual magnetism on the disk surface.

However it is suggested tat with the aid of an electron microscope a lab team may still be able to view data that was on the disk, by ananlysing the residule traces of magnetism.

The only to truly destroy a disk is to grind the disk surface into a fine sand.

for most home and business use a 5 swipe zero will be enough though!
 
as ive heard, typical military behavior is to destory hardware rather then let it go out of their ownership intact.

if your worried about securely deleting stuff, but dont want to go to the extremes of raising hardrives about their currie temperature id just use encryption instead.

pg wrote a (the?) paper about secure deletion:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
 
As I have a friend who's dad is in the US air force, and know their house to contain several 'bits' marked property of the US government. I know for a fact that their destroy all hardware thing might not always be as stringently carried out as they might like.
 
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