How to Completely delete and old laptop hard drive

Discussion in 'PC hardware help' started by Nrth16, Apr 5, 2010.

  1. Nrth16

    Nrth16 Regular member

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    I have a laptop that crashed on my and I took the hard drive out of the laptop and have gotten everything I wanted off of it using and external plug. Anyway I am trying to figure out how o completely wipe this hard drive so that I can sell it.

    Can someone walk me through the steps of deleting his hard drive please!

    It is a PC hard drive and it is connect to another PC using an sata/ide combo drive adapter.

    Thanks again for the help
     
    Nrth16, Apr 5, 2010
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  2. ddp

    ddp Moderator Staff Member

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    use a program called killdisk supposedly free off the net.
     
    ddp, Apr 5, 2010
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  3. kgtrain

    kgtrain Regular member

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    Theres a free software program called DBAN that whipes the hard drive to American DoD Directive 5220.22M standard.

    Or for some more overkill..
    Theres also the "Secure Erase" command which is built into all ATA/SATA drives manufactured after 2001 (most BIOS's disable this) which NIST (US Government’s National Institute of Standards and Technologies) rates as equivalent to magnetically wiping a drive or physically destroying it. This will erase all your data, and will not be recoverable by even data recovery services.

    Theres a Secure Erase.exe that uses this command which can be downloaded from http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml
    Please click the Read me link before attempting to use it.
     
    kgtrain, Apr 6, 2010
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