Erasing Hard Disk

Vander · Post by **Vander** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 12:25 pm

Does anyone know of a good freeware utility that will allow me to wipe a Hard Disk completely, perhaps some sort of zero-fill utility? I need to format some drives, and make the data unrecoverable. (It's for a law office)

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 12:35 pm

Maxtor and WD both have low level format utils on their websites, run it three times in a row and your at the same level as the government.

CDN_Merlin · Post by **CDN_Merlin** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 12:58 pm

Krom wrote:Maxtor and WD both have low level format utils on their websites, run it three times in a row and your at the same level as the government.

Only some dept. Where I worked at Foreign Affairs, our HD's were actually put in a shredder. And yes, it literally shredded the drives to pieces.

Vander · Post by **Vander** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 1:01 pm

Do those utilities work on All hard disks? (even from different manufacturers)

Samuel Dravis · Post by **Samuel Dravis** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 1:10 pm

Yeah, I think the shredder would work on pretty much everything.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 1:27 pm

Yeah, a shredder would work on anything.

the LLF utils will work on any brand drive.

Verran · Post by **Verran** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 1:49 pm

DBAN

Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction.

It's open source and free.

MD-2389 · Post by **MD-2389** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 2:20 pm

Vander wrote:Do those utilities work on All hard disks? (even from different manufacturers)

I can't speak for Western Digital, but Maxtor's does.

Vander · Post by **Vander** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 4:10 pm

I'm using MaxBlast4 now. The download page said it would only work with Maxtor drives, but luckily all the drives are old Quantum drives.

Thanks for the tips.

Kyouryuu · Post by **Kyouryuu** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 10:13 pm

Autoclave is a disk-based utility that essentially runs a tiny Linux with the "shred" utility that writes zeros and random junk to the hard drive too. Has a configurable number of passes.

woodchip · Post by **woodchip** » Fri Apr 22, 2005 5:08 am

Try this:

http://www.wizard-industries.com/

Download Sure Delete for free. It will over write all parts of the drive with no info with 1's and 0's. You can specify the number of passes (more passes = more security).

Fusion · Post by **Fusion** » Fri Apr 22, 2005 10:03 pm

Verran wrote:DBAN

Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction.

It's open source and free.

I'll Second the Use of DBAN. We at my job have been using it quite effectively, and when it is done, u need to install the OS to start up the computer.

It is a very useful little app.

Fus