I was wondering about this subject after the local news station here got hold of a few used state government machines. Couldn't you achieve the same thing if: 1. use fdisk and repartion the drive into 1 or more partitions. 2. create a large file(2MB+ size determined by memory and disk geometry?) with a null characters repeated as contents for the file. 3. copy the file as many times to fill up the disk Wouldn't this overwrite everything on the disk? Where else could the old data be hiding? Brian wrote: >I'm testing data destryoing/recovery tools to determine just how good is >good enough when it comes to destroying data on a disk. > ><cut> > >