If Gentoo can die off, ReiserFS is doomed (was Re: Reiser FS or ext3?)

[Philip Dorr]

you could just `sync` to make sure it goes to the disk, but if I
recall `dd` only writes to the device you tell it to and not some RAM
location

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 2:24 AM,  <jim at jimani.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 08:10:37PM -0500, Monty J. Harder wrote:
>
>> Anyone who thinks that "reformatting a filesystem" is the same thing as
>> "wiping a hard drive" doesn't understand the meanings of the words
>> "reformatting", "wiping", or "filesystem' for that matter.
>
> The D.O.D. doesn't use the term "wiping", they talk about "de-classifying"
> which requires "degaussing", not something easily done with software.  I
> can't remember their term for "wiping", removing non-classified data from
> the media before selling to J. Q. Public, but the procedure was basically
> what you use for "wiping".  They didn't seem to care much about the 0xAA
> and 0x55 patterns, they just wanted the 0's, 1's and random, and wanted
> thousands of passes rather than dozens of passes.  And there was concern
> that the software might be doing all its writing to a disk buffer somewhere
> in RAM rather than the actual disk.  So I guess if you want to "wipe" someone's
> disk you should first remove all but one stick of RAM, then fire up Open Office,
> the Gimp, and a few instances of Firefox, and THEN run your "wipe" program.
>
> --
> Jim
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