Wiping Hard Drives

Jokester · 5 Sep 2011 at 19:49

Looking for some free, easy to use software for wiping hard drives. Any recomendations?

hegemon · 5 Sep 2011 at 19:56

http://www.dban.org/

Raumarik · 5 Sep 2011 at 20:38

+1 for Dban, it's rather superb

Jokester · 5 Sep 2011 at 20:40

By the sounds of things, the only disks I should have connected are the ones I want erased yeah?

RJC · 5 Sep 2011 at 20:41

Jokester said:
By the sounds of things, the only disks I should have connected are the ones I want erased yeah?

Yes, that's what I did when using dban!

Knowing me I would have erased everything, including data I need!

hegemon · 5 Sep 2011 at 21:25

Jokester said:
By the sounds of things, the only disks I should have connected are the ones I want erased yeah?

It does allow you to select which drive(s) but I agree with RJC, better to be safe than sorry.

Sin_Chase · 5 Sep 2011 at 21:27

Degaussing is SOOOOO much fun though. Push Uppppp aand leffft *DRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR*

No drive left afterwards.

theheyes · 5 Sep 2011 at 21:30

For the time it takes to disconnect the drive(s) vs drowning in a pool of your own screams when you realised you've made a mistake, I'd say it's definitely worth it.

CaptainRAVE · 6 Sep 2011 at 20:33

Another vote for Dban!

LizardKing · 6 Sep 2011 at 21:04

Personally i use Shred to fill the drive with 0's
Its much quicker than any drive wipers and will defeat any off the shelf data recovery software which to be fair is all you need unless you have some pretty dodgy content!

CaptainCrash · 6 Sep 2011 at 23:00

LizardKing said:
Personally i use Shred to fill the drive with 0's
Its much quicker than any drive wipers and will defeat any off the shelf data recovery software which to be fair is all you need unless you have some pretty dodgy content!

Yup... AFAIK it's simply not possible to recover any sort of useful data from a drive which has been completely zero-filled, there are certainly no documented cases of it ever having been achieved.

The time-consuming multi-pass-with-random-data options are really just for the terminally paranoid.

rarryawn · 7 Sep 2011 at 19:53

Realistically only one pass is required if you are using a random erase method. If you have truecrupt installed already you could just use that - use volume wizard to encrypt the hard drive (encrypt and format, not in place) that effectively fills the drive with random data.

welshdragon · 7 Sep 2011 at 20:49

Kermit said:
CCleaner has a Drive Wiper in its Tools section.

I only noticed it the other day when I needed to wipe a drive but as ccleaner is pretty popular it might save you having to install something else.

I've used this. Quite good and you can select security levels to wipe too.

+1 for ccleaner