anyone recommend something to securely remove all data off HDD

unhappyvirgincustomer_2

Hi,

I am going to sell the HDD off my broken laptop but want to ensure as much as possible there is no data on it and make it as difficult as possible for anyone to try and retrieve it.

Can anyone recommend a good free application to do this?

Thanks

Mike

Browntoa

http://www.dban.org/

colin79666

I'm a big fan of Darik's Boot and Nuke (http://www.dban.org/)

It's a bootable system (based on Linux I think) which can wipe everything off the disk to a variety of industry standards.

If you can't use the laptop then you will need to put the drive in an external caddy or another laptop to wipe it. Be very careful if you have other disks connected to the machine because if you wipe the wrong drive there is no way to get the data back!

Edit: dammit Browntoa you got there .1 second faster!

Curryeater

If you want something mainstream and nice and simple this weeks computer active has a free download of Paragon disk wiper SE. This will let you wipe any disks connected to the PC or create a boot-disk to run in another machine.

The magazine is £2 but all you need is the url from the magazine to download it and the web address to register it (dont think I am supposed to post them here but 2 mins in teh supermarket with a pen and paper and your sorted)

totalsolutions

Remove drive and keep it for yourself, or just run fdisk and reformat, or try dban as suggested.

unhappyvirgincustomer_2

thanks very much I'll give Darik's Boot and Nuke a try

I have removed the drive and can plug it into my pc to do the job once I have got all the data off it.

TopCat888

Hi there,

depending on how protective you are, I used to work at a goverment tech department and they used a product called KillDisk, we used the DOD 7 pass to 'Zero' out all the data. This verson costs $40 to $50 USD.

was effective, but took a hell of a long time to do depending on the size of the HD, back then they were 40GB units and it was a case of kicking them off and leaving them over night to complete.

i can't comment on the other products people have recommended, just thought i'd give my 2p worth.

TC

bryanb

A large hammer will do it v. quickly.

isofa

bryanb wrote: »

A large hammer will do it v. quickly.

It's have to be a very large hammer...

Still even in pieces forensic tests have proved that it's relatively easy to extract data from parts, this have been done in tests for zeroed data and fire and water damaged systems too.

But for a normal user without top grade security cleared data, DBAN is about as good as it gets and it's free.

4743hudsonj

Microwave is the most reliable way:)

600w:5mins, shake, 2mins
750w:4 mins, shake, 2 mins
850w:3.30mins, shake 1 min

and your done:P

haha

Marty_J

isofa wrote: »

It's have to be a very large hammer...

Still even in pieces forensic tests have proved that it's relatively easy to extract data from parts, this have been done in tests for zeroed data and fire and water damaged systems too.

But for a normal user without top grade security cleared data, DBAN is about as good as it gets and it's free.

Being able to extract data in parts is very different from being able to extract useable data. Even when data has been written over once, it's currently pretty much impossible to recover anything useful from it.