[CentOS] What is the universal (world wide) understanding behind degaussing harddisks?

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

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