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

[Phil Dobbin]

On 02/04/18 15:09, wwp wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> 
> On Mon, 2 Apr 2018 10:01:56 -0400 m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Note that the original message has also been sent to the fedora users
> mailing list, no doubt it's spam now.

this message turned up on ubuntu users as well.

Cheers,

  Phil.

-- 
Broken windows and empty hallways,
Pale dead moon in a sky streaked with grey,
Human kindness - is overflowing,
And I think it's going to rain.........today

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