Basic Format Question

panthro · 12 Jul 2012 at 11:46

I have an old laptop that I want to sell for ~£50. I need to wipe the HDD first and have no plans or reinstalling an operating system on it. How do I go about doing this? It runs Windows XP IIRC.

NealR · 12 Jul 2012 at 11:48

DBan - http://www.dban.org/

Name · 12 Jul 2012 at 11:59

quick question, once a nuke of the drive is complete. Can you then re-install windows should you desire ? or does it render the HDD pretty much useless

honosuseri · 12 Jul 2012 at 12:03

Download ultimatebootcd and burn it to disk. It's full of diagnostic kit and tools for "scrubbing" the drive clean.

It's doesn't damage the drive, it writes over the data many many times......like scribbling over a mistake when you write something down in ink

NealR · 12 Jul 2012 at 12:06

name89 said:
quick question, once a nuke of the drive is complete. Can you then re-install windows should you desire ? or does it render the HDD pretty much useless

Once 'nuked' it basically makes the HDD fresh, as if it came from the factory. Ready to use, all clean

Kitarist · 12 Jul 2012 at 12:22

So is Dban the best for this or are there any others that do this kind of job even better?

Thanks!!!

AbsenceJam · 12 Jul 2012 at 14:28

With a HDD just do a full format in Vista or later, it will zero the whole disk.

For an SSD use HDDErase (you can use this on a HDD too but it will take as long as a zero fill).

No need for any boot disks or multiple passes that do NOTHING.

Ascendancy · 12 Jul 2012 at 14:47

AbsenceJam said:
With a HDD just do a full format in Vista or later, it will zero the whole disk.

For an SSD use HDDErase (you can use this on a HDD too but it will take as long as a zero fill).

No need for any boot disks or multiple passes that do NOTHING.

Lol

AbsenceJam · 12 Jul 2012 at 14:55

Ascendancy said:
Lol

I bet you £1000 you can't recover a single byte from a HDD I zero fill.
I'd bet £10,000 the NSA couldn't either.

NealR · 12 Jul 2012 at 14:58

AbsenceJam said:
I bet you £1000 you can't recover a single byte from a HDD I zero fill.
I'd bet £10,000 the NSA couldn't either.

Bet you can't either after I dban'd a drive.

Bet I could retrieve data from Vista or later Windows formatted HDD.

AbsenceJam · 12 Jul 2012 at 15:00

NealR said:
Bet you can't either after I dban'd a drive.

Bet I could retrieve data from Vista or later Windows formatted HDD.

A full format in Vista or later zero fills a disk.

If a disk is full of zeros there is nothing else there.

Still want to bet?

NealR · 12 Jul 2012 at 15:24

AbsenceJam said:
A full format in Vista or later zero fills a disk.

If a disk is full of zeros there is nothing else there.

Still want to bet?

I stand corrected(just a couple of google searches) - It would mean that the HDD's I had recovered recently from a Vista build "full" format was clearly not a "full" format, as was described to me.

Although, having used dban personally for awhile now, and having needing to use a multi-pass formatter previously in a couple of jobs, I just have out of habbit always dban'd HDD's that I later sell on or otherwise

AbsenceJam · 12 Jul 2012 at 15:31

NealR said:
I stand corrected(just a couple of google searches) - It would mean that the HDD's I had recovered recently from a Vista build "full" format was clearly not a "full" format, as was described to me.

Although, having used dban personally for awhile now, and having needing to use a multi-pass formatter previously in a couple of jobs, I just have out of habbit always dban'd HDD's that I later sell on or otherwise

I think most people still think you need to do multiple silly wipes to erase data, once it's overwritten by anything it is gone and unrecoverable through software or physically.

NealR · 12 Jul 2012 at 15:40

Assuming you don't just remove the MFT

But there some applications that I know of, forensic recovery that would probably manage to pull something, but I've never tried them personally(never needed too yet!)

AbsenceJam · 12 Jul 2012 at 15:54

NealR said:
Assuming you don't just remove the MFT But there some applications that I know of, forensic recovery that would probably manage to pull something, but I've never tried them personally(never needed too yet!)

Nope, 100% no. Just think about it.

SSD's are another matter because of their wear levelling and reallocation, so you can't just zero fill them because not all of the disk is always visible. Although I don't really know if the currently unused cells contain anything. You can't always use the Secure Erase command as not every controller supports it, and it wouldn't work in some USB enclosures. If it works then your drive is clean in moments though.

Ascendancy · 13 Jul 2012 at 10:53

AbsenceJam said:
I bet you £1000 you can't recover a single byte from a HDD I zero fill.
I'd bet £10,000 the NSA couldn't either.

Looking at your other posts in this thread you obviously have no idea what you're talking about.

Ever heard of magnetic force microscopy? A sector that has changed from a 1 to a 0 has a totally different magnetic signature than a bit that was always a 0.

Granted the standard consumer won't be able to recover data from a zeroed drive, but to claim that the NSA couldn't is quite frankly, hilarious.

Have a read of this: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

I'll quote the conclusion for you

Data overwritten once or twice may be recovered by subtracting what is expected to be read from a storage location from what is actually read. Data which is overwritten an arbitrarily large number of times can still be recovered provided that the new data isn't written to the same location as the original data (for magnetic media), or that the recovery attempt is carried out fairly soon after the new data was written (for RAM). For this reason it is effectively impossible to sanitise storage locations by simple overwriting them, no matter how many overwrite passes are made or what data patterns are written. However by using the relatively simple methods presented in this paper the task of an attacker can be made significantly more difficult, if not prohibitively expensive.

AbsenceJam · 13 Jul 2012 at 16:17

Ascendancy said:
Looking at your other posts in this thread you obviously have no idea what you're talking about.

Ever heard of magnetic force microscopy? A sector that has changed from a 1 to a 0 has a totally different magnetic signature than a bit that was always a 0.

Granted the standard consumer won't be able to recover data from a zeroed drive, but to claim that the NSA couldn't is quite frankly, hilarious.

Have a read of this: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

I'll quote the conclusion for you

A theoretical paper from 1996 with no practical use even then, with disks thousands of times smaller lower in density. ALSO, you chose to ignore the rather non-committal epilogue.

I stand completely by what I said. If I was the worlds highest profile terrorist and needed to wipe a disk I'd still just zero it.

Kitarist · 14 Jul 2012 at 12:59

So which app is good enough to do a job like this?

Thanks!!!

The1nonly1 · 15 Jul 2012 at 19:07

I'd say DBan if you want to be on the safe side

hansp · 16 Jul 2012 at 07:57

Ascendancy said:
Ever heard of magnetic force microscopy? A sector that has changed from a 1 to a 0 has a totally different magnetic signature than a bit that was always a 0.

Granted the standard consumer won't be able to recover data from a zeroed drive, but to claim that the NSA couldn't is quite frankly, hilarious.

Have a read of this: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

His paper is about theoretical erasing of data, not recovering of overwritten data (he also made that clear in a later update).

I don't think anybody yet has demonstrated that they can do it.