"Cleaning" the Hard Drive

lushkat

Hi

Anyone know how to clean the hard drive of a PC so that I can donate it without risk of any of my personal data being found. I remember that there is some s/w you can get but dont remember what it is called?

Thanks

Ken68

Loads in Google.....'deleting hard disk data'.Some software looks to be free.

intel

Download this http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ and you will have to burn a copy
as a bootable image (ISO) file so that it will boot on start up, when that has been
done you can use D-Ban. If this is too hard I would take out drive and smash with hammer or keep, If they dont want the drive that is.

albertross_2

Use this, it will create a boot floppy or CD, boot from it, overwrite the hard disk at least 7 times (more if you are paranoid).

http://www.cbltech.com/data-shredder.html?id=3

It will have no operating system installed when you have finished..

tigermatt

You can't actually remove all traces of data from a hard drive because the tracks and sectors of the disk could be examined and the data could be regenerated from the info found.

But, it is very unlikely someone will do this unless they want to spend thousands of pounds. Useful article here: http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2001/2001-05-14.htm#1

mr_fishbulb

tigermatt wrote:

You can't actually remove all traces of data from a hard drive because the tracks and sectors of the disk could be examined and the data could be regenerated from the info found.

But, it is very unlikely someone will do this unless they want to spend thousands of pounds. Useful article here: http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2001/2001-05-14.htm#1

It's true that companies can use microscopes to read the polarity history of a hard drive and reassemble the 'bits' from there, but if you use a program that writes a 0 to every part of the drive, then writes over every part with a 1, then a zero again, etc then the polarity will be so faint the data cannot be recovered. I think I remember when I was using PGP this had to be done at least 7 times to be safe.

tigermatt

mr_fishbulb wrote:

It's true that companies can use microscopes to read the polarity history of a hard drive and reassemble the 'bits' from there, but if you use a program that writes a 0 to every part of the drive, then writes over every part with a 1, then a zero again, etc then the polarity will be so faint the data cannot be recovered. I think I remember when I was using PGP this had to be done at least 7 times to be safe.

Yep when erasing individual files I erase over them with Eraser 35 times (or 7 for large files) so it is most likely unreadable. Trouble is writing over a whole disk with 1s and 0s 7 times can take a considerable amount of time, so try leaving it on overnight doing it

damski_2

I use a program called "sure delete"

get it from here

http://www.wizard-industries.com/index.php

you can either "clean" single files or a whole disk or partition

used correctly you wont need to create a boot disk first, it simply over-writes all your deleted data to US Govt standards

and

ITS FREE

matty_c608

7 Times is the US Military Standard