Fully erasing a hard disk?

quackers · 5 Mar 2009 at 18:44

Lo all,

I'd like to fully erase a hard disk, you know completely wipe it so you can't really recover anything from it.

What's the a decent free program to do this?

CaptainCrash · 5 Mar 2009 at 18:49

Darik's Boot And Nuke

quackers · 5 Mar 2009 at 19:07

Awesome, i'll have a go of this

OCdude · 5 Mar 2009 at 19:12

Yup, can't beat DBAN - tis good.

quackers · 5 Mar 2009 at 20:16

Seems to be working ok so far with a bootable cd, i opted for the autonuke feature

How reliable is this program? I can see it using the DoD short method

philjohn · 5 Mar 2009 at 20:53

quackers said:
Seems to be working ok so far with a bootable cd, i opted for the autonuke feature

How reliable is this program? I can see it using the DoD short method

short of very expensive scanning electron microscopy (which even then is largely unproven outside of 2 papers by Gutmann) nobody will be getting stuff off there.

Defenestration · 5 Mar 2009 at 21:45

A single pass with random data is enough with modern hard drives.

quackers · 5 Mar 2009 at 22:30

Groovey thanks chaps, it's still going 5 hrs to do an 80gb drive. I don't even want to think about the length of time for a 1tb drive

Skeeter · 5 Mar 2009 at 22:33

Shred it, its the only sure fire way.

CaptainCrash · 6 Mar 2009 at 07:34

Skeeter said:
Shred it, its the only sure fire way.

Only if you don't have enough brainpower to use a simple disk wiping utility.

There's absolutely no sense in wasting perfectly good hardware on the basis of uninformed and hysterical "Which?" reports.

AJUK · 6 Mar 2009 at 07:53

Dban is great.

No need to do anything other than a single pass of zeroes. Individuals certainly do not have the resources to get anything off a zeroed disk, there are some agencies and organisations that have the ability to reconstruct SOME data if they know what they are looking for but if you are hiding data from those sort of people you are in kinda big trouble already!

After a DOD 3-pass that disk will be squeeky clean.

Uhtred · 6 Mar 2009 at 08:30

CaptainCrash said:
Only if you don't have enough brainpower to use a simple disk wiping utility.

There's absolutely no sense in wasting perfectly good hardware on the basis of uninformed and hysterical "Which?" reports.

that report made me angry!

Tomsk · 6 Mar 2009 at 09:03

quackers said:
Groovey thanks chaps, it's still going 5 hrs to do an 80gb drive. I don't even want to think about the length of time for a 1tb drive

Too late now, but try eraser. It works from within windows, so you can keep using your PC.