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How long to 7x wipe ibook 80 gig HD?

U

UKmacman

macrumors 6502
Original poster
So far it has taken 6 hours and has said another 7 hours for 5 of them. Anyone know how long this should take for a 7 pass? It is a 1.33 G4 ibook with an 80 gig HD?

Should I just cancel it and do a 1 pass? It is for a resale?

Any advice appreciated
 
Yes, you should cancel. This is utterly pointless in all but the most extreme cases (when LOTS of legitimately sensitive information was once on the disk). It would've made much more sense to simply secure delete files in OS X that you wanted GONE gone and then done a normal format/re-install to sell.
 
UKmacman said:
So far it has taken 6 hours and has said another 7 hours for 5 of them. Anyone know how long this should take for a 7 pass? It is a 1.33 G4 ibook with an 80 gig HD?
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It depends on what kind of data you have on the HD.

One pass should be okay for most folks. However, if you've had very personal data on the HD that you would not want someone to ever see, then 7 passes would probably be a good idea.

If I understand your comment, it looks like you've completed 2 of 7 passes. For most, this would be enough.

Not sure how long it will take, aside from the obvious 7 times as long as it takes to do one pass (roughly).
 
UKmacman said:
So far it has taken 6 hours and has said another 7 hours for 5 of them. Anyone know how long this should take for a 7 pass? It is a 1.33 G4 ibook with an 80 gig HD?

Should I just cancel it and do a 1 pass? It is for a resale?

Any advice appreciated
Click to expand...

Ages, if you can't just leave it until its done you'll be fine to cancel now, the chances of anything being recoverable now is fairly low.
 
Dude I wouldn't even do a 1 pass that still takes forever. Just wipe the thing and be done with it. Unless your buyer is a Chinese spy no one is gonna be able to retrieve anything from the drive. Much rather bother to try.
 
Update: Here's what I did

1 pass - it got to 'creating partition' and said it would take over 1000 hours - I assumed it crashed so cancelled it.

7 pass - left it overnight and was only half done so based on points here cancelled it

1 pass - did another one pass and same partitioning time thing happened so cancelled it

re-installed mac os x

Do you think it is pretty safe or not as I have not done one complete delete till the end?
 
UKmacman said:
7 pass - left it overnight and was only half done so based on points here cancelled it
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Hmm. I just did a 1-zero on an 80 gig last night. It took about 2 hours to do. You probably shouldn't have canceled it since you were half there. I don't know if DU doe the entire surface 7 times, or if it does 7x sector by sector. If it's the former, then you probably got at least 3x wipe.
 
Cave Man said:
If there's anything on that drive, I could recover it using Data Rescue II. And no, I'm no Chinese spy...
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Of course you aren't a Chinese spy 😎
"I am not so easily fooled Mr. Bond, you see in only a few minutes you will be dead and I will be hundreds of miles away with your precious Data-film."
 
Ok chinese spies - so what's the minimum someone needs to do to ensure old data cannot be retrieved through programs like mac scan 2?
 
UKmacman said:
Ok chinese spies - so what's the minimum someone needs to do to ensure old data cannot be retrieved through programs like mac scan 2?
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One time overwrite, and you need special hardware to read it.
Seven time overwrite, and the CIA may have special hardware to read it, or they may not. Nobody knows.
35 times overwrite, and the CIA doesn't have special hardware to read it.

Anyone who can read the data after one-time overwrite would have broken into your home to get your laptop before you overwrite the data. Anyone who could read it after seven time overwrite would have kidnapped you instead, and put anyone into jail who asks questions.
 
Great and last question.

Everytime I do a wipe it gets tot eh 'creating temporary file' part and seems to freeze. Well it doesn't freeze but just goes on forever. If I skip this has it still done the wipe?
 
zepharus said:
Im guessing there is a ton of kiddie prOn on that drive if you need to wipe it that badly... wow
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If your data is really that sensitive, I'd pull the original HD, buy a blank and put that in before selling the machine. Then get one of those big degaussing electromagnets and let the HD sit on that for a few days (rotating it every few hours of course). Then detonate the HD with some explosives and sink the pieces in to a deep body of water.

/not advocating kiddie porn - simply illustrating an extreme example of data security.
 
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