On Friday 08 September 2006 17:03, you wrote:
> A few years ago I was doing a forensics security review for a client that
> had data that needed to be erased VERY reliably.  The determination was
> that because even IDE disks did remapping internally, it would be possible
> for previously written data to be inaccessible to a program writing random
> data over the whole disk several times.

Yes. Many drives provide a manufacturer-specific API that lets you force a 
low-level format, but at the portable level, there is no way to ensure this.

Cheers,

--Ian
-- 
Zmanda: Open Source Data Protection and Archiving.
        http://www.zmanda.com