Hard drive format

[Caspian]

how can one stay away from java when its all over the place?

With a Starbucks on every corner I know what you mean.

As far as wiping your disk, use the link Fur posted. This level of wiping is not just for government or security. Just about all public US companies are required to do multi pass wipes on HDD that are going away. If you have the time for it, it will not hurt anything at all. I did some contract work for a large bank. At their data center they had this cool box that you would put a HDD in, lock this thick door and hit the button. You could hear it spin up for about 20 seconds and then it would have this audible pop as it released a ratehr large electomagnetic pulse and you could hear the disk bounce and *poof* your disk was clean - and would never hold data again.


Re: java - just don't install it. If it is installed, uninstall it through the control panel like any other program. If you go to a site that asks you to install java, don't unless you really want to use whatever it is they have.

[Catamer]

a full wipe like that wouldn't hurt the drive and would help you get rid of your virus, however I would think that it's probably not any different than doing the "slow" format of the drive where it validates that there aren't any bad sectors on the drive by writing info and reading it back.
there is an information area about the drive partitions that might get flushed better with the special program.

as for the virtus checker, I personally use Avast only because they were one of the first to claim to run on x64 and they have a freeware version.
I'm not that big of an internet browser kind of person so I'm not sure how great this checker is. ( I browse here and a couple of the wow sites, semi safe if you ask me ) and I have a blizzard authenticator so I can care less about key loggers on my wow accounts.
I had my yahoo email hacked into once but that was because I had open wireless and no local pc passwords on my LAN, once I disabled the wirless and placed passwords I've not had any problems since.

[wowphreak]

If all yer doing is redoing yer system then all yeh need to do is a quick format.

If yer getting rid of the drive like throwing it away due a secure format there's people that specialize in recovering interesting thing off of hard drives that people have tossed out :P

[Powerwar]

Boot any linux install CD in rescue mode.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
Wait lots of time until it give you end of device error.
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda
Wait lots of time until it give you end of device error again. This will take lots of more time because it will basically exhaust the RNG capability of your computer.

After that you are ready to format the HD in any kind of partition table you want. Be warned that some Os installers like windows95 and windows98 ones will think that your HD has about several Zetabytes (about 1.000.000 TB or alot more). Just start again your linux install Cd and create a new big partition in this case. After that you can install windows if you want. Vista and XP installers rarely have such problems anyways.

[Mooni]

Just about all public US companies are required to do multi pass wipes on HDD that are going away.

Mool-tee-pass. Corbin Dallas Mool-tee-pass.

[Yamio]

Great movie.