This site says there's no way to recover data after using the 'dd' command...

[BigToque]

http://16systems.com/zero.php

The guy on this site states that there's no way to recover data on a hard drive after using the command "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[drive]" and that thinking you need to write random data multiple times is simply unnecessary.

What do you guys think?

Moved to appropriate forum - Moderator Rubycon

 

[Colt45]

More or less. The idea with the multiple writes is that if the heads have any slop in them, they'll overwrite data that was written slightly "off track" (again, originally written slightly off due to slop).

I see it realistic in ancient 10MB hardrives with stepper motor controlled heads, and fat tracks.. but now days with very accurate heads and uber small tracks, I doubt how much it matters. I imagine just a wipe of zeros should stop most folk...

If you're concerned, use something like shred... do a few passes of pseudorandom data, then one of zeros.
eg. 'shred -n 3 -z /dev/hdx'

 

[silverpig]

I'd guess that if Osama bin Laden's personal itinerary for the next year was on a hard drive with dd zeros written to it that the NSA could probably get something off of it. Joe the plumber with a freeware version of disk restorer 1.02 couldn't do anything with it though.