To delete all data from a freecom external hard drive

[BARB74]

I have a FREECOM external hard drive which is no longer sufficient for my backup, so I would like to remove all data from it in order to give it to my grand daughter who is still at school.

How do I achieve this or maybe reformat it?

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi Barb, & Welcome to Tom's Hardwre!

I don't find a Freecom set of tools that might have a secure erase included, like Seagate Seatools or WD Lifeguard tools.

Couple ways to securely erase a HDD that you could use.

CCleaner, a very good and well respected free utility has an appl called Driver Wiper under "Tools". You can wipe the whole disk with with 3, 7, or 35 passes (3 should be fine - 7 if you are compulsive - 35 if you work for the NSA!) to make sure nothing is retrievable from the disk. Make sure you choose ONLY the disk you want to wipe clean from the menu.

If you want to have the disk just like it came from the factory, you could the Windows CommandLine Interpreter called Diskpart. It is much techier, done from the command line, and you have to make sure you are wiping that specific disk, not one of your attached disks.

to use it, you go to Accessories, right click on CMD, choose RunAs Administrator.
Type DiskPart
Type List Disk - it will list all the attached disks and each will have a number. Pick the number of the disk you want to wipe clean
Type Select Disk (that number) (like Select Disk 3) - that disk will have the focus
Type Clean All - that will clean the disk with the focus, all the disk sectors, and set all bytes to 0.
When done, Type Exit - done, and you are out of the DiskPart interpreter.

 

[BARB74]

Thanks for that, but I'd omitted to say that I'm using an Apple computer. I did find the result I wanted by following these steps (thanks to Google). Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility, and selecting the Freecom HD from the list. I then had several choices I could choose from i.e. Repair, Erase, Partition etc
So simple and worked like a dream!

 

[John_VanKirk]

Thanks for that, but I'd omitted to say that I'm using an Apple computer. I did find the result I wanted by following these steps (thanks to Google). Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility, and selecting the Freecom HD from the list. I then had several choices I could choose from i.e. Repair, Erase, Partition etc
So simple and worked like a dream!

Great, and it should make you feel good, more confident, that you did it yourself!