[Macpartners] Zeroing sectors of just one volume (on a partitioned drive)

[Timothy Boyden]

Although not free, SuperScrubber from Jiiva Software 
(http://www.jiiva.com) $29.99 claims to securely erase data from 
internal or external hard drives and partitions.

Honestly I'm not sure how secure this approach would be given that due 
to defragmentation data gets written all over a hard drive so even if 
you did zero just one partition, data from that partition may still be 
on other parts of the drive and recoverable through professional means.

A better approach would be to copy the data you want to keep to another 
drive, zero the old drive and copy the saved data back to the old drive. 
It's going to take awhile to zero the drive anyways so the extra step of 
copying the good data won't mean much in the end. Also it's a safer 
method given something could happen to the good data during the zeroing 
process of the one partition.

Tim Boyden
MIT Department of Facilities
IT Group

David M Rosenberg wrote:

>With Apple's Disk Utility (version 10.4.4 in MacOS X 10.3.9), when
>you go to erase an entire drive there is an "Options..." button that
>has checkboxes for the following two options:
>
>Zero all data (writes zeros to all sectors of disk)
>
>8 Way Random Write Format
>(writes random data over entire disk eight times)
>
>However, if I go to erase one volume on a disk drive, the "Options..."
>button is disabled and I don't see a way of zeroing all the sectors of
>just one volume.
>
>Does anyone know how to zero all the sectors of one volume without
>effecting other volumes on the same drive with either Apple's Disk
>Utility or some other free utility?
>_______________________________________________
>Macpartners mailing list
>Macpartners at mit.edu
>http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/macpartners
>  
>