Fully erasing a hard disk?

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
5,832
Location
Liverpool :-)
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?
 
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
 
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.
 
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
 
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. :D
 
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