Cleaning Hard Drive?

[michael]

I want to sell my computer, but i heard formating doesn't clear your whole harddrive, i want to wipe it clean, how can i do this. Thanks again :D.

[Chris]

Smash the HDD into pieces with a hammer and burn any remaining parts.

Formatting will "clear" your HDD and yes data could be retrieved with the right tools.

But unless your harbouring some national secrets then who would want to take a look at your HDD and go to the effort needed to view its contents.

Application: http://www.killdisk.com/

[r4may]

Depends on how clean you want it.

Format will clean the HDD but it is possible to recover the data.

Norton Wipe disk/file is probably better.

[bvw]

If you're that concerned just buy a new drive and install that.......then keep your "old" one. :)

[Gagaman]

I like to use Eraser. Works fine and its free :)

Eraser is an advanced security tool (for Windows), which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Works with Windows  95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP and DOS.

Eraser is FREE software and its source code is released under GNU General Public License.

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

[michael]

bump so which should i choose?

[Gagaman]

I only have experience with Eraser. It works pretty well. From what I read , killdisk is ok also. I dont have norton,so no experience with that... as it is a well known company, I presume its ok also... so make your choice. In my opinion all 3 will wipe your HD profoundly.

[scuzzman]

Just grab a Linux live CD and do this (this is how I'd do it)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

Of course, not everyone has a Linux Live CD laying around.

Apart from that, Eraser works very well, but it requires an OS (which you'll be deleting I would think)

This leaves only 2 options:

1) smash the HDD with a hammer and burn the pieces or

2) format it withough installing an operating system (Linux Live)

[xakep]

According to naval security group manuals, a disk whose contents are deleted must be subsequently written to at least 3 times with characters 3, then 9, then X. I forgot what software performs this procedure.

But isn't it possible to fill up the disk with 100 mb files holding nothing but X's?

[r4may]

Most HDD manufacturers Utilities have a 'Return to New' state utility. download from your HDD manufacturers' web site.

[xakep]

Here's a cleaning test I ran on one of my floppies.

In MS Paint I created a field 800x596 pixels of simple brown color. I saved this as a BMP file. I copied that file onto the diskette.

I checked the floppy with a Hex editor's disk edit and view. The only latent things I saw was the partial name of the old files in the FAT.

I copied the Brown file onto the diskette again, and everything was gone.

I think having performed this three times might just erase all magnetic traces of previous data.

[Sepher]

Its called doing a 'government wipe'.

Do a search on google and pick the soft that works best for you.

There was a prog with the word mechanic in the name that I recall was quite good for this..

~S~

[Sepher]

Oh yeah, its called System Mechanic, and it has lots of useful features...

~S~

[madboy33]

I have allways used Necrofile http://members.aol.com/programmers/nfinfo.htm

I have used it for years

If you format your hard drive then use this, it will erase anything that is on the free part of the drive