At 05:19 PM 8-25-98 -0400, Nancy F. Lloyd wrote:
>                                                   .... does anyone have
>suggestions about how we can insure that none of our data can be
>recovered from the drives of these machines once we ship them?

Well, it's not Friday (the traditional humor day here on the hp3000-l
range) but I remember reading during Desert Storm that US personnel were
equipped with laptop computers for certain missions.  Of course, the
applications and data on them were considered secret. In the event of
danger that one might fall into enemy hands, the unit responsible was to
fire a minimum of something like five rounds into the unit, no less than
three of which were supposed to go into the hard drive.  I guess that's the
mil-spec solution.  :)

For a practical solution, it seems to me that it might be straight forward
to connect the drives up to a PC or Macintosh with external SCSI and
partition and high-level format the drives for that environment.  Once
that's done, it will be quite a lot of work to get anything meaningful from
the drives.  It's said that the old data can still be read with sufficient
effort.  (The NSA is rumored to have at least the powers of a minor deity
in the sneakier parts of the digital world after all. ;)  But any old
company won't make hide nor hair of them once you've written a significant
amount of data on them, especially if they don't get a whole volume set.
So any technique that overwrites a substantial portion of the drive will
probably do.

The more sensitive your data and the more paranoid you want to be about it,
the more effort it may be worth to you.  But the odds are pretty long that
it will ever be a problem.
--
Jeff Woods
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