Information security, recycling and irony

[Fred]

...
> > Some it also depends on having a badblock scan before data touches it.
> > Anyone know how to do this in windows?
>
>   "CHKDSK /R" does a read test of every block on disk.  That's not
> always useful, though.
>
>   I used to put a lot of trust in "badblocks -w", but recently I've
> had a few disks pass that with flying colors, only to crap out in
> production use.  I haven't had a chance to investigate further.  I
> suspect it's the same design intelligence problem mentioned above.  It
> makes failures less likely to happen, but harder to diagnose when they
> do happen.

I've noticed that *some* IDE hard drives have a built-in secure-swipe 
feature. You can see this if you dump the information with hdparm. Never 
played with those options for very obvious reasons.

-Fred