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PartedMagic , because no one has ever used a euphamism for a project name.

Modern IDE drives don't allow low-level formatting, and as far as I know, even re-writing the user content of the drive does not re-write sector header data.

Enhanced Secure Erase should get a bit further than the user content. When initiating that, the drive internally uses the more detailed information it knows about itself to perform a deeper erase (at least in theory). For this kind of operations I recommend Parted Magic (works for nuking SSDs too).

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

For some reason that always takes much longer than other methods. Still not sure why.

Anyway, I personally recommend the Secure Erase command. It works for HDDs and SSDs, takes care of resetting G-list and TRIM data, and the drive itself knows the best way of nuking itself most efficiently. There's this tool called Parted Magic which works great for this purpose and other disk operations. Just my 0.02€.

Parted Magic is also quite nice.

Thanks, its nice to have a conversation about both the goods and bads of *NIX that doesn't devolve into an argument. I think it is easier to have an open mind if you use software pragmatically as opposed to zealously following one sect or the other. I see this time and time again with BSD vs. GPL licensing debates. GPL advocates often see BSD-licensed code as too easily stolen and BSD advocates see GPL-licensed code as "infectious" and too restrictive. The reality is that a developer needs to weigh the different licenses and decide if they want the code free for anyone to take or if they want others to be required to share changes back with them.

By the way, I took a look at the feature sets for qtparted and gparted. There are some screenshots on the respective web pages. I know (k)ubuntu keeps low-level system tools to a minimum, but I would be shocked if neither of these were in the default repositories. Gparted definitely is more feature-rich, but if you don't need any of the extra features I would try QTparted first. Gparted would likely require extra gnome libraries if you are in KDE.

Also, if you want or need to do offline partition management, I would recommend using the Parted Magic live CD.

Lastly, it looks like NDS is still alive and running in SUSE Enterprise Server, but under the name eDirectory. I am not familiar with it, so I do not know if it does as good a job as Group Policy in Active Directory at managing settings for tons of machines remotely. There is also no price listed, and I believe it is sold separately from SUSE Enterprise, so it may also lose out on a cost standpoint.

Coral Cache:

http://www.goodgearguide.com.au.nyud.net/article/351651/12_most_interesting_unusual_useful_linux_distros/

List of the distros:

• Damn Vulnerable Linux
• Tinfoil Hat Linux
• CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment)
• CAELinux
• Ubuntu Christian Edition
• live.linuX-gamers.net
• Parted Magic
• Musix GNU+Linux
• Zeroshell Linux
• Mythbuntu
• Damn Small Linux
• Tiny Core Linux

steveha

Why is Ubuntu so synonymous with Linux? Don't people know there are alternatives, or are they all too "geeky" for normal users? I've tried lots of Linux distributions and they're all very nice and usable. Couldn't they base this on Debian, or Fedora, or even just make their own distribution? Basing it on Ubuntu would only add unnecessary bloat; just give people something like Parted Magic or D@mn Small Linux (or something similar with maybe a more appropriate name for banks) and don't reinvent the wheel. "Can Ubuntu save online baking?" why not "can Linux save online banking"?