Definition: degauss: The term degauss means to erase magnetic media. They work by creating magnetic fields thousands of times stronger than that used to store data on magnetic devices, thereby erasing them. Degaussing is a destructive process. It generates a lot of heat which can physicaly damage the device, and it will remove the "low level" formatting that is shipped with the drive. Note that some SCSI hard-drives can be low-level formatted in the field.

Best practice: Degauss all floppy disks and hard-drives before throwing them away. A lot of data from corporations have been recovered from defective disks that were thrown away. An equivalent for CD-ROMs is to put them in the microwave. See also: wipe.

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Source: Hacking-Lexicon / Linux Dictionary V 0.16
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Dictionary/html/index.html
Author: Binh Nguyen linuxfilesystem(at)yahoo(dot)com(dot)au
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