Hi, is there any way to securely erase hard drives of all data before reformatting and selling your PC? thanks in advance.
do a full format on the hard drive at least 8 times to be sure that every last fragment of data is wiped from your drive, then reinstall windows as normal... even using industry standard recovery tools you wont be able to get data from a drive thats been formatted that many times
hello Rollitos, check this out for a good eraser !! its a linux distibution so its free http://www.linux-kurser.dk/secure_harddisk_eraser.html hope this helps retro
Every disk manufacturer has a utility to format their drives. Maxtor`s for example is called ZERO Fill and is part of their Maxblast software for setting up their drives. Or you can use somthing like this : http://www.killdisk.com/
Ok thank you for the advice. here is the catch, i dont have a floppy drive. I have drive scrubber (part of system mechanic) but that requires a floppy as well. Sypher, can you give a me a more in depth way on how to do what youre saying?. thanks again.
Buy a 14.00 usd floppy then and Darik's Boot and Nuke over st sourcefourge is good shit. I believe its dban for short. Download the ultimate boot cd...burn it to disc....and dban is located on the menu of the of the boot cd. Just boot it from start up/ http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
unfortunately to do what im suggesting youll proabably need a floppy drive, unless you can get bootmagic onto a USB flash disk and make it bootable (not entirely sure if you can do that but ill find out as i need to do it myself)
Using a quick or full format does not overwrite the data area of the disk. A quick format resets the system part of the disk and rewrites the file system. Opting for a full format also does a check for bad sectors (which is why it takes longer), it does not overwrite the disk sectors. So to be safe you must use a utility which overwrites every sector on the disk - you could do a full format a thousand times but the data part of your files will still be there.
of course if you werent planning on keeping the hard drive i would suggest the use of my HD toaster to irradicate every bit of data and every single circuit all in one go rendering the hard drive completely unreadable no matter how hard you try. but since the hard drive is going to be used im not going to let you use my toaster lol (the toaster is a normal 2 slice toaster that has been modified to fit a hard drive into it and the heat elements have been replaced with electro magnets)
