Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming wrote:
Good evening from Singapore!
The foremost question which I want to ask is, what is the universal (world wide) understanding behind degaussing hard drives?
I work for No Secrets Agency (NSA) Pte Ltd (fictitious company name used). My sales manager Edward Joseph Snowden (fictitious individual name used) had *promised* our customer Leave Me in the Lurch (S) Pte Ltd (fictitious company name used) that we would "DEGAUSS" their hard disks after the PC replacement and data migration exercise for 15 trillion PCs (fictitious number used).
PC = Personal Computer, which includes desktops and laptops
<snip> A little too much other info, and overly eloquent. However, if your company told the client that you were going to deGauss all the h/d, that's what you need to do, contractually.
If they've had a second discussion, and only want the data deleted, that's another story.
Is the data on a different partition than the o/s (i.e., /data? If so, you can easily wipe the data, using say, shred, or DBAN (which offers both 3-pass and the full 7-pass DoD 5220.22-M). If it's in the same partition, and the same filesystem, you've got other issues. How do you *guarantee* that there's no user data - say, installed third-party software mixed with the o/s?
Note that you really do have to make any third-party software, if it's commercial, Go Away.
mark