Formatting a Hard Drive

Marky

Marky

Marky

Soldato
Joined
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UK
Hey all,

I have two 1TB hard drives I need to completely empty as I am selling them on.

I've never done this on a Mac. The drives are SATA but I have a USB enclosure that I will use to connect them to the Mac.

How can I completely empty them? I need them absolutely emptied with no chance of data coming back :p

Thanks,

Marky
 
Hook them up to the caddy then USB to the Mac.

Spotlight "Disk Utility"

Double check you have the correct drive selected, choose the "Erase" tab.

Click the security options, choose whichever method you want, click OK then click erase.

It's easier and quicker when doing it as opposed to reading how to do it :)
 
I've heard things such as people saying "I deleted a hard drive, sold it, and somehow people were able to retrieve the data I deleted and sold my information to the public - Now I have no job, money or life *sadface*" :p

I just want to make sure everything is gone and gone forever :p Is it really as easy as erase and then done? :p
 
Marky said:
I've heard things such as people saying "I deleted a hard drive, sold it, and somehow people were able to retrieve the data I deleted and sold my information to the public - Now I have no job, money or life *sadface*" :p

I just want to make sure everything is gone and gone forever :p Is it really as easy as erase and then done? :p
Click to expand...

That's getting into the murky world of "do I need to Gutmann my drive to be safe?". The arguments for and against are almost as heated as "which OS do you prefer".

If I'm doing a reinstall or I'm not planning on selling the disks, I zero out. If I'm planning to sell the disks on I Gutmann (35 pass) just because the option is there. It takes forever though the larger the disk.
 
AbsenceJam said:
Absolutely no point in doing more than zero'ing a disk.
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=19057494&postcount=12

You overwrite something on a hard disk, and it's gone, and never ever forever can it be recovered. Now if you're silly and just delete the partition table or files...
Click to expand...

Can you explain to me why when I have used single passes on USB devices or HDDs I have been able to recover files? The software used for the erasing was Ccleaner and DBAN.
 
Brian8bit said:
Can you explain to me why when I have used single passes on USB devices or HDDs I have been able to recover files? The software used for the erasing was Ccleaner and DBAN.
Click to expand...

That's not actually possible with a hard disk unless you interrupted the process or did something massively wrong such as only wiping one partition or the free space. I'd stake all my money on it.

Flash memory I don't really know about, USB keys and the like can be wiped easily to my knowledge but I'd suggest researching it if it's important to you. I've not had need to do this. I've read articles about issues with SSD's as how they work is quite different with the reserved sectors and wear levelling; and they also don't all support the SATA erase functions either (not that it necessarily would work in any instance).
 
Cool. Got any more links to articles regarding secure erasing? I go through a lot of drives and I'm always erasing and recovering stuff. I'd like to know more. Especially stuff on SSDs as they're more prevalent now.
 
Brian8bit said:
Cool. Got any more links to articles regarding secure erasing? I go through a lot of drives and I'm always erasing and recovering stuff. I'd like to know more. Especially stuff on SSDs as they're more prevalent now.
Click to expand...

It's easy enough to find some; well actually that's untrue as there is so much misinformation about this around. And of course being the internet, no matter how soundly anything is presented someone will still come out and say without basis that the NSA can do it or other such rubbish.

There was a site a while back that set a challenge of recovering anything from a disk that had been zero'd once just to show that it really couldn't be done, and draw attention to this. It prompted me to actually look into it, read a few articles and papers including the Gutmann ones and others; not to mention test it myself.

The key to really remember is that even with the most infinitely minute chance that someone could physically study the platters of your hard disk and determine that possibly one bit they looked at was a zero (and this just cannot happen), software recovery is still entirely detached from this and not possible. The disk is all zero's, there's no way of seeing anything else or reading it in some sort of special way.
 
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