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I'm not entirely certain it'd work on memory cards, but it works great on hard drives. You can overwrite clustertips, free space, etc. with many passes of psuedo-random data. I think the new version is commercial, so here's a link to an older version: http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/

I would make sure that that computer continues to operate efficiently. I would erase things that I don't need in order
to free up space, I would defragment the hard drive, and I would run Eraser to clean the unused portions of my hard drive
from any flotsam that could gum up the works. This would have nothing at all to do with any of this RIAA or court stuff,
it would be routine maintenance of my everyday working computer.

http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/

I use Eraser every day, like brushing my teeth. Make it part of your daily routine.

Windows - http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/ Linux - http://wipe.sourceforge.net/

I tried to recover the date using some freeware/shareware data recovery tools found on download.com at the time. Could not get any to work. But the DOD 27 pass took FOREVER. I gave up and used my dads acetylene torch. Worked quite nicely...

http://www.pgpi.org/products/pgpdisk/

http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/

Never, ever forget these programs for Windows. They prevent anyone from snooping on your drive, even after you erase something. I run "Eraser" at 7 wipes every 2 weeks and have all my important files in PGP disks. Even the CIA can't crack PGP, they had to install a keylogger just to get his PGP key. Thats REAL security. http://www.pgpi.org/products/pgpdisk/ http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/

IOW, tho the security issue exists, it's not exactly something to lose sleep over -- because if someone wants to compromise your security, why not get current data right from today's data input, instead of possibly-obsolete data of unknown relevance!

Because that Asian rape spam that popped up into your preview pane 2 years ago may not be a daily occurence. The FBI loves pulling up ancient JPG fragments from swap in their ongoing efforts to protect children.

Despite what you may have heard, the legality of pornography is of no relevance to prosecutors and judges; the first time the question of age comes up with regard to the subject of any particular photograph is when the jury is looking at poster size blowups of whatever they scraped off your hard drive.

To prevent fascism (or at least thwart it), do the following. Set the not-commonly-known "clear swapfile at shutdown" windows registry key:
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\ClearPageFileAtShutdown to 1
Wipe your empty space and slack space regularly with something like eraser. (Interestingly, I don't know of a way to accomplish these things when using Linux as a desktop OS. If anyone knows of a way to clear the swap partition on shutdown or to clear not only free space on the hard drive, but also cluster tips (file slack), please let me know.) When finished using a hard drive, or any time you have cause to format it, boot up to rescue mode from any Linux distro's boot CD and dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda (or whatever device your hard drive happens to be).

I have had access to the tools the bad guys (FBI, et. al.) use to extract evidence from your hard drive, and have seen that these procedures work brilliantly. Of course, I've also seen prosecutors derive character witness testimony from the very fact of using a program like eraser (only bad guys know this much about how to hide computer evidence!), so YMMV.

If you don't happen to live in the United States, treasure your freedom and fight to protect it.

Eraser is a GPL program that (among other uses) will overwrite empty hard disk space as many times as you specify. Simply change the pagefile size to 0MB, restart, and run eraser on free disk space. Tell it to overwrite 7 times. There's no way anyone's recovering it then.

dd if=/dev/zero of=zeroes

Or, if you don't want to mess with scripts and installing cygwin:

1. Download Eraser from here. (A very nice privacy tool for Windows, BTW.)
2. Install
3. Go to erasing prefs (Ctrl+E) and click New
4. Enter description: All Zeros
5. Click Add
6. Click Save
7. Select new "All Zeros", go to Unused Disk Space tab and do the same.
8. Click Ok
9. File - New Task (Ctrl+N)
10. Set up tasks for the drive(s) you want to zero out and then run them.
11. Profit! (Sorry.. couldn't resist.)

BTW.. if you want to use this for privacy, you probably *don't* want to use the All Zeros overwriting option. If you son't know why, read this interesting article.

The only thing keeping me from donating an old HP 6170S is that I don't know what to do about erasing the HD. I'm using Sami Tolvanen's Eraser, a GPLed utility, but I'm still a little nervous. Of course there is the option of simply destroying the HD, but this particular monstrosity has a very flaky BIOS that somehow makes it extremely difficult to install new HDs.

I too love NTP, especially since my old (p133) computer would lose about 57s daily. But you don't need to be on Linux to take advantage of getting your clock synced on the hour. WinNT and 2K have NTP built in, letting you sync via the 'net.exe' tool, although I'm not 100% sure on that.

The rest of the Win32 crowd can use on of many, many utils to synchronize their clocks. It's enough to search for 'synchronize' on download.cnet.com to find a bunch of them. I recommend Sync-It With Atom, but that's just a personal preference.

jedrek

Granted I'm no expert on hard drives at a purely hardware level, but I don't think this would be that hard to do.

Start with the usual re-partition and reformat so you have a completely blank drive. Then completely fill up the drive with essentially meaningless crap, white noise. Then reformat again to blank it. All data should be completely gone.

Something like Eraser should do it I'd think. Granted it's for windows, but I'm sure there'd be a Linux or BSD equivalent somewhere.