Erasing Hard Disks ??

[DGP_2000]

I have a couple drives I'm going to sell & was wondering what the best way was to COMPLETELY erase all information that's currently stored .

Do I just Format the drives ?

I just want a way to get rid of all the data with there being no way to extract what's on there .

Thanks .

 

[Arrow]

There might be an even better way, but I would remove the partitions using FDISK (and maybe format).

Rob
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[Guest]

There is a little program called slate that completely erases everything on your hdd, and it is unrecoverable, so if you were selling a hdd to someone you should use a prog like that

 

[peteb]

Lot's of people have different ideas on this one.

I'll tell you that FDISKing will not delete your data.

In fact formatting won't delete your data.

The only way to truly delete the data is overwrite it. Many apps now are available now to do this - write 1s to the whole disk.

Some people go for 5 itereations of an FDISK/Format as safe. You may find some file fragments after that, but you should be pretty safe.

So - what are you trying to hide?!?!?! )

Pete.

-Your Comany Names Could Be Here-
e-mail for application details.

 

[Kelledin]

What's needed is a "disk shredder" program. There should be plenty of freeware/shareware ones out there. Or, if you're running GNU/Linux/UNIX, you can use the "yes" command to completely fill a hard drive with some arbitrary character. i.e. if the drive you want to erase was /dev/hda3 (<b>make sure it is /dev/hda3 before you try this</b>):

yes "" > /dev/hda3

No third-party disk shredder needed. *NIX rocks!

Kelledin
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[Lars_Coleman]

The government actually does a LLF like 10 times and then toss the hard drive. Anyone that knows how to read the filesystem can recover anything off of a regular format. Just a format just tells the OS that it can write the sector again, instead of being basically "write protected", so the OS just re-writes the sector over what was there.

Lars Coleman

 

[Guest]

Norton Utilities includes a "wipe space" program that cleans the free space on your drive. Format it then run "wipe space" (or whatever it's called) and you're good to go.

Or so I believe....