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Erasing Hard Disk
Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2005 12:25 pm
by Vander
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)
Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2005 12:35 pm
by Krom
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.
Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2005 12:58 pm
by CDN_Merlin
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.
Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2005 1:01 pm
by Vander
Do those utilities work on All hard disks? (even from different manufacturers)
Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2005 1:10 pm
by Samuel Dravis
Yeah, I think the shredder would work on pretty much everything.
Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2005 1:27 pm
by Krom
Yeah, a shredder would work on anything.
the LLF utils will work on any brand drive.
Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2005 1:49 pm
by Verran
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.
Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2005 2:20 pm
by MD-2389
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.
Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2005 4:10 pm
by Vander
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.
Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2005 10:13 pm
by Kyouryuu
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.
Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 5:08 am
by woodchip
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).
Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 10:03 pm
by Fusion
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