I have a stack of old floppy disks in my server room and before disposing or donating them, I want to make sure they are cleaned. Can anyone suggest some free utilities (Windows or Linux) for securely wiping data from a floppy disk?
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I use dban for mass wiping of disks, it supports all the major overwrite standards and has very good hardware support. However, modern research seems to indicate that a single zero pass wipe is sufficient for data destruction. In that case, you might as well just use a linux system and issue the following command:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fda
This will overwrite the floppy with all zeroes. Change the zero to urandom for a pass of random characters.
Scott Pack
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Perhaps a bit more destructive then you are expecting, and completely worthless if you want to donate them. But I simply rip them open and then run the diskette through a cross-cut shredder. You can always follow that up by running shredded bits under bulk tape eraser.
Zoredache
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Who would you donate them to? I can't remember using a floppy in the last 8 years, seriously. How many do you have? If there isn't a ton of them, crush them with your hand for stress relief...
squillman
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Don't wipe them in software. Huge waste of time, considering the rate of bad blocks you'll have. If you must, format them, it has better error handling characteristics. Beware that some of the advice given will result in disks that are not wiped past the first bad block.
Run a strong magnet over them. Beware that the metal in a 3.5" disk can injure you (or if it can't, your magnet isn't strong enough).
Then throw them away. Any cause that is worthy of giving a donation to is not going to be helped by a donation of garbage. If there is an organization that takes donations of garbage to be used in art projects, I guess it makes sense to give the disks to them. It just sounds unlikely.
carlito
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If you have installed the SpyBot Search and Destroy utility to secure your Internet Explorer, it comes bundled with a secure delete application.
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In CS class in high school we had a giant magnet you could turn on to wipe disks. Of course, we had to do that to a classmate's homework once...just to test it. I'm sure it would work for you.
Kevin Kuphal
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If you are running Windows 2000 or later, you can use cipher.exe (included with the OS) to securely overwrite deleted data on a drive.
Microsoft's KB article here: How To Use Cipher.exe to Overwrite Deleted Data in Windows
Sean Earp
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If you have a Linux system then use dd, or in a Windows system I would go for for Eraser
Luis Ventura
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Try wipe , can get it from Knoppix or Ubuntu or most major linux distros. I would recommend running it on the disk rather than a partition if you can for added paranoia.
hellomynameisjoel
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Big Fire - seriously, it's probably not much less environmentally damaging that just throwing them in the garbage and it will 100%, absolutely, positively kill all data in one handy way.
Chopper3
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dban is very good. It can also wipe disks to a US Department of Defense standard. That should be fairly secure. :)
Amandasaurus
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You can simply overwrite its content with random data multiple times with this simple bash script:
for i in $(seq 1 10); do echo pass $i; dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/fd0; sync; done
It goes through the disk and overwrites every sector with random data 10 times.
After that, you need to reformat the disk (probably for fat12).
If you are rescuing data from a such floppy, or try to re-use a floppy with bad blocks, ddrescue is better as this simple script. It is in the package gddrescue on most linux distros.
peterh
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