DBAN or Active Killdisk?

zom247

zom247

zom247

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I've been sorting through all my drives and I've got about 6 that I want to sell but need to wipe them first.

I just want to know what I should use to wipe them. If I use DBAN I'll have to remove all my other drives from the PC and I've read it takes ages to do. Killdisk can be run in Windows and takes a fraction of the time but is it good enough? The drives were just used to store movies (not pron - I'm keeping those drives :) ) but I'd still like to wipe them. Unless there are any other alternatives of course...
 
you can get dban to wipe specific disks, or all.

Put as many as you can into a machine, and tell dban to wipe them all :)
 
NealR said:
you can get dban to wipe specific disks, or all.

Put as many as you can into a machine, and tell dban to wipe them all :)
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Ok, thanks for that. How many passes should I go for? Is the 3 pass option (autonuke I think) enough?
 
zom247 said:
Ok, thanks for that. How many passes should I go for? Is the 3 pass option (autonuke I think) enough?
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Even just 1 pass is enough that anyone wanting to get at the data will need specialist equipment.

Also, eraser can work from within Windows.
 
when i was at work, had a nurse came in who had put a floppy disk on a rad and left it, it was knackered by any way you would look at it, sent it away and she got all her stuff back, my point is, if someone wants it, they will get it, not even that hard tbh either.

crush / drill then burn, and if they still want or can get the bits off the fragments they can have it, i've had a load of fun in the past with old drives that's have been acquired / second hand etc upgrades etc

as long as i was sure nothing important was on them, i wouldn't sell them unless i really needed the money, no matter what wiped them

and yes b4 anyone says anything i know how both programs work as well, the programs overwrites the hd with random letters and numbers a given number of times, each byte / sector etc so in theory should leave a unrecoverable media.

left in a test machine for a given amount of time, depending on size and speed of drive etc. the time taken to do multi passes of lets say a 1tb 7200 speed ide drive would be, yes a few hours, to be sure you would do more than this and also free one only does one pass and not to NSA levels

The free version only supports 'One Pass Zeros' method -- you have to upgrade to the professional version to get 17 other erasing methods (including DoD 5220.22-M) try any of these and see your day go, larger and slower drives can take a week as the write method is slow
 
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A floppy disk isn't an HDD. 1 pass of zeros is fine. Don't let zakblood make you paranoid.

DBAN 1 pass mode should be just as fast as killdisk.
 
no all i was trying to saying is, almost anything can be recovered with the right software and time, thats all.

and it seems none of you have done any serious software recovery either, then again it seems im as old as most of your dads, again i keep forgetting how young most of you are.

not paranoid unless listening to black sabbath
 
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zakblood said:
no all i was trying to saying is, almost anything can be recovered with the right software and time, thats all.

and it seems none of you have done any serious software recovery either, then again it seems im as old as most of your dads, again i keep forgetting how young most of you are.

not paranoid unless listening to black sabbath
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Feel free to post the evidence.
 
ok what sort are you looking for, i can start with the predicted earning from this year of Kroll Ontrack, getback etc, there companies have grown bigger than almost any sector in the same market, when most companies are having a down turn because of the climate etc

most of the top 100 companies used ontract this year alone making it a uk leader, have you seen inside of there Forensics recovery department? im guessing not, you may have used a free or £20 program that you think will do what a company spends millions on research to recover and wont find nothing, UK is in someways on par with the NSA in the usa for recovery of what most of you think is unrecoverable, thats fine by me, advice is only one persons opinion, so you maybe right.

im not going to spam the thread only for someone else to post a different point of view with different links of there own, bit pointless when most wont read or understand what's found anyway.
 
Show me evidence of data recovery after a modern HDD has been zeroed (1 pass).

getdataback.org ain't going to help you.
 
I work for a large NHS trust and when the IG Toolkit came in to play a while ago, our new Info Sec Manager was a bit of a paranoid muppet, so having used Kroll for a few recoveries in the past, we decided to take 3 working disks, and use Active Killdisk on all 3 using one pass zero random, german vrs, and nsa 130-2 (different method on each disk)... couriered the disks down, got a phone call about a week later asking what had actually happened to the disks as they couldnt recover absolutely any data from any of the disks, all of which just had a plain bog standard Windows XP SP3 install with a text file on each of the admin's desktop entitled "Well Done Kroll" ...

That was about 4 years ago now, so unless they've got super duper new kit in, then I would be confident that if Kroll couldn't the data we sent, then no one could. I know they're probably the best at what they do, like I said earlier, we have sent disks to them before to recover very sensitive data where my GetDataBack efforts fail and they have never failed us yet (where we haven't purposely wiped them)
 
zakblood said:
as long as i was sure nothing important was on them, i wouldn't sell them unless i really needed the money, no matter what wiped them
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Sound a bit paranoid to me.


zakblood said:
ok what sort are you looking for, i can start with the predicted earning from this year of Kroll Ontrack, getback etc, there companies have grown bigger than almost any sector in the same market, when most companies are having a down turn because of the climate etc

most of the top 100 companies used ontract this year alone making it a uk leader, have you seen inside of there Forensics recovery department? im guessing not, you may have used a free or £20 program that you think will do what a company spends millions on research to recover and wont find nothing, UK is in someways on par with the NSA in the usa for recovery of what most of you think is unrecoverable, thats fine by me, advice is only one persons opinion, so you maybe right.

im not going to spam the thread only for someone else to post a different point of view with different links of there own, bit pointless when most wont read or understand what's found anyway.
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The person who buys the OP's HD or any used HD is very unlikely to spend several (if not hundreds) times the amount they paid for the HD just to get at the wiped data.
 
Tomsk said:
Even just 1 pass is enough that anyone wanting to get at the data will need specialist equipment.

Also, eraser can work from within Windows.
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not talking about the pro version, just the one pass free one,

and you also mentioned specialist equipment, so did you forget about the post?:eek:

i'll leave it at that, so feel free to talk with each other as you seem to know about it, i'll keep my opinions to myself as you seem to not need the help in here as you already know it

but i'll stand by my first post, not edited either, no free or £20 program with one pass is worth anything, hope you treat your phones and anything else with data on the same as there's plenty of people who'd like your data.

merry christmas
 
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zakblood said:
no all i was trying to saying is, almost anything can be recovered with the right software and time, thats all.
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You left the third thing required to do proper recovery out of your list, money.

No one is going to buy a second hand disc for cheap then spend a grand sending it to a specialist to try and recover the data.

Yes things generally can be recovered given the right resources, but the likelihood of that happening in this case given the costs involved are extremely low.

And if you are unlucky enough to have a state nation after your disks then you've probably got bigger worries ;)

Now if he was trying to flog some old MoD disks or the like then yeah I'd be more inclined to say don't sell them, destroy them :p
 
zakblood said:
and you also mentioned specialist equipment, so did you forget about the post?:eek:
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No I didn't forget about specialist equipment. I don't have exact knowledge of what such equipment is, but I can take an educated guess.

A HD that has been wiped by a free program, is unlikely to yield the wiped data to another program, simply because it's using the same hardware and firmware that the free program used to wipe it. As far as the HD's hardware and firmware are concerned the data isn't there.

In order to use the HD's hardware, the firmware on the HD would probably need to be re-written so that any weak signals from the heads could be considered as data. A more determined recovery of data would likely involve bypassing the HD's hardware and accessing the raw signals directly from the heads as they read the disk or directly examining the disk platters by some other means.

I don't know how much it costs to recover data, but I bet it's a lot more than a used HD, and the average punter or would be fraudster buying a used HD is unlikely to go to those lengths and costs just to get at some data which may or may not contain information that they could use.
 
OP if you want to be really sure and have Windows 7/8 and some spare time just enable bitlocker on all of them and then DBAN them. No chance of getting anything back then as it was encrypted then wiped!
 
Tomsk said:
The person who buys the OP's HD or any used HD is very unlikely to spend several (if not hundreds) times the amount they paid for the HD just to get at the wiped data.
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I'll have you know that there may well be some very interesting home movie clips that show me living it up drinking on holiday. There's all sorts of pervs out there :D
 
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