You don't necessarily need a dedicated wiping utility, any UNIX / LINUX systems you have are already up to the task, and if you don't have any you only need one of the readily downloadable bootdisks - the tools needed are standard and not large. UNIX has two devices that may be of interest - /dev/random and /dev/zero, the former outputs a series of random numbers when read, the latter a stream of zeros. "dd" is a utility which reads from one file and writes to another. So you can fill a hard-drive with random bits by typing: dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda (assuming you are wiping the first IDE harddrive, otherwise you'll have to replace the hda for something else) Once you have completed as many passes as are necessary, you can repeat with: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda To ensure that the drive is blank, and can be partitioned without "corrupt partion table" errors. I understand that this doesn't provide a facility for you to `specify the wipe byte,' but I think this solution is just as good. Julian
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Jun 21 2001 - 12:01:20 PDT