Clean Formatting?

[CuRsEE]

I want to sell my system but I want to totally clean my hd. I've heard that fdisk is the best to get but when I built this machine I decided not to get a floppy drive. Anyone know of a way to wipe it clean without being able to recover filez?

 

[_WW_]

There is software available to do this. If your drive is a WD I believe their tools available at their site can be written to CD and then used.

Here is a free one. Eraser 2.1

 

[pscowboy]

Fdisk does not wipe a drive clean. It sets up, or deletes the boot partition sector.

If you are really that worried about someone accessing your info, throw the hd out. Sell the unit without it. But, FYI, it takes very sophisticated (and expensive) software to access the info on a formatted hd.

I believe Eraser is a trojan, spyware, adware cleaner and privacy blocker, rather than a hard disk wipe.

WW is right about the various hd manu's having utilities to work on their drives. One such is low-level formatting, which supposedly returns a drive to factory condition. Check out your hd makers' web site for available programs.

 

[riser]

Microsoft was featuring a program to wipe out systems at www.microsoft.com/technet the other day.

Haven't looked at the site since last week but it was a little program that writes 0s 3 times over on your hard drive.

 

[TunaSoda]

I believe a low-level format (writing 0's to the drive) would be a good idea
Or, just fill the drive to capacity with new (un-cared-about) files, this will re-write the sectors

 

[_WW_]

I believe Eraser is a trojan, spyware, adware cleaner and privacy blocker, rather than a hard disk wipe.

WW is right about the various hd manu's having utilities to work on their drives. One such is low-level formatting, which supposedly returns a drive to factory condition. Check out your hd makers' web site for available programs.

Ah yes, my bad.

But there are some out there. Search your favorite software download site...

 

[CuRsEE]

I found a good program that worked great called Active @ KillDisk. I would recommend it to anyone, and thanks for the help everyone!

 

[gunbuster82]

I have had great success with Darik's Boot and Nuke. It is free and has several different erasing schemes depending on how clean you want it.

You can find it at there website here:
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

 

[CuRsEE]

thanks alot man . . . I used killdisk though and it worked like a charm!