USB Bootable tools lowlevel format,

Stufish

Stufish

Stufish

Associate
Joined
9 Jul 2011
Posts
12
Hi All,

I have been searching the forum for about 30-mins and there are so many posts it's eye-watering.

I'm looking for a USB bootable set of tools that will let me wipe both windows and mac.

Any suggestions? I don't mind paying up to £10.

Thanks
 
Just FYI, modern hard drives and SSDs don't need to be low level formatted and attempting to do so will more then likely make the drive unusable.

Depending on if you just want to delete the partitions or just make it impossible to recover any data, Gparted will be good enough for the former but if you want to zero out the whole drive it's going to be more complex since while DBAN is the more known way to wipe drives, it's only good for hard drives as solid state drives will require a different set of tools to secure erase them which from looking at the as the list of disk wiping tools included with ultimate boot CD it does include tools for wiping SSDs (although on the standard PC side of things some motherboards might have the ability to secure erase SSDs in their BIOS, but I'm not 100% sure about that since I haven't gotten hands on with more current motherboards).
 
If solid state drives
Try looking for the manufacturers software
Usually will have a secure erase
Option in it

For windows
Check If your bios has secure erase
In it
No idea about mac
Vaguely recall using transmac/mactrans forget which it's called
Let me read mac drives on pc
Don't remember if could wipe them though

As mentioned gparted is a good tool too
If you look around the Internet
You can still find the free version
Though think the paid version
Is relatively cheap from memory
 
Last edited:
demonix said:
Just FYI, modern hard drives and SSDs don't need to be low level formatted and attempting to do so will more then likely make the drive unusable.

Depending on if you just want to delete the partitions or just make it impossible to recover any data, Gparted will be good enough for the former but if you want to zero out the whole drive it's going to be more complex since while DBAN is the more known way to wipe drives, it's only good for hard drives as solid state drives will require a different set of tools to secure erase them which from looking at the as the list of disk wiping tools included with ultimate boot CD it does include tools for wiping SSDs (although on the standard PC side of things some motherboards might have the ability to secure erase SSDs in their BIOS, but I'm not 100% sure about that since I haven't gotten hands on with more current motherboards).
Click to expand...
Thanks. Gparted worked well for one of the things I wanted to do.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom