confidential info on old harddrives.

From: Don Maslin <donm_at_cts.com>
Date: Sun May 30 22:34:01 1999

On Sun, 30 May 1999, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote:

> Let's see.
> I have enough old 4096s to make a decent R.A.I.D. And 225s, 412s, And a
> lot of other old drives and diskettes.
>
> But many of them were parts of systems on which I worked on source code of
> a little bit of value. (enough so that there was actually a break-in
> attempt at theft once! But the casing was so clumsy that all that they
> got were some diskettes clearly labelled "V2.4 source code self-extracting
> archive", that actually contained a trojan to wipe hard disk directories.)
>
>
> It would be a hassle to reassemble a machine just to check the drives to
> make sure that they were all erased properly. So, should I give the ones
> that I no longer want to somebody who acknowledges intellectual property
> rights and would HELP if I screwed up and made a mistake; or should I let
> somebody have them who feels that whatever is on them is now theirs, and
> would RUN a self-extracting archive?

Your point is well taken as to whom might be suitable recipients, but in
reality, it shouldn't take but 20 minutes to cobble together a
motherboard with minimal memory, video, and an MFM HDC to do a low level
format on each of them. That would rather eliminate the agonizing. For
my part, I'd take the ST-412s and 225s before I'd look at the 4096s,
though.

                                                 - don
Received on Sun May 30 1999 - 22:34:01 BST