How to permanently delete data from a hard drive
Table of Contents
First of all, you must know that simply deleting a file by any operating system (open or not) or formatting a hard drive, is not sufficient to permanently delete data from this hard drive.
These methods are not sufficient for the actual application of the medical confidentiality, such as when a health professional wants to replace a working computer in which are located potentially personal unencrypted patients' data.
The objective of the protocol described on this page is:
- That no one can manage to recover any data in memory after application of this protocol.
- That it is reusable by everyone, which means based on Free Softwares.
This protocol is of course updated according to the state of knowledge.
Protocol to erase permanently data from a hard drive :
- How to create a live-CD or a live-USB, with a linux distribution on it
- How to log in as a root user
- How to know the hard drive indicative, by using fdisk -l (it's often /dev/sda)
- dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX bs=? (where /dev/sdX has to be replaced by the hard drive indicative)
The following topics are explaining every steps of the protocol :
