Evening. So, I've just agreed to a sale of my current HDD to another forumite over in the Bit-Tech marketplace. This being the first time I've ever passed on a HDD to someone I'm unfamiliar with, I was wondering if there was some recommended disk wiping software that I can use to securely erase it's contents without completely thrashing the drive? Any suggestions appreciated. TSB P.S > I did do a forum search, but results were over 7 years old, and talking about floppies etc
DBAN or UBCD from memory most allow multiple passes, 3 should be fine Edit : just reread your post and these both do full data passes, there was something I have seen used at work but I forget the name now, I will check in the morning.
What about O&O Blue Con http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oobluecon/index.html ? or O&O Safe Erase?
Do these tools check the drive afterwards as well or is NTFS Undelete still good for double checking if anything can be recovered?
I work for an asset management company and we use a software called blanco which is a great bit of kit although im sure there is a free copy you can download
DBAN, during the process of wiping, essentiall takes the drive back to the state it was when it left the factory - no trace of formatting on it at all, not even in the areas that NTFS etc leave empty for boot sectors, etc. If you used something like NSA or Gutmann standard erase (7 and 35 passes respectively) there would be an infinitesimally small chance of anything recovering data - particularly with the latter. Last I checked, the DBAN website explained what various options do, and how secure they are.
A full single write of zeros will completely wipe all data from a modern hard drive. No further passes are needed. You can use the secure erase feature of the hard drive (which does this precisely this) using something like Parted Magic, or using any software that performs the same full write task itself.
Hammer. Those glass platters will be abolutely unreadable once in a thousand shards. Not kidding. How much does a HDD cost these days? Surely just replacing it is easier (and possibly cheaper than specialist software) and not too big a price to pay for ultimate peace of mind?
Minor thread resurrection overlooked, none of the data I had was important/sensitive; but equally I didn't want to hand over a used unformatted drive; or one that could very easily be restored if I just did a standard wipe... Also, I wished the drive to be restored to it's original performance, so zeroing was perfect!
