Can I wipe a hard drive using a puppy linux live CD?

[Colonel Panic]

In Gutmann's original article, he talks about extracting information from an erased hard drive by using techniques like Magnetic Force Microscopy. That means that you have to open the drive, remove the platters and analyse them with specialized equipment and trained technicians.

It's not like someone is going to pull your hard drive out of a dumpster, plug it into his own computer and extract your credit card number.

Even Gutmann has now backed away from his original erasure method because hard drive technology has changed so much in the interim.

Consider this scenario. You use dd to fill the drive with zeros using a single pass. You then read it back using dd and get nothing but zeros. You read it again and still get zeros. Why would you expect that someone else reading the drive would get the original data?

Good post, I agree (and I recall that Dennis McCunney made much the same point a while back on here).