Can someone recommend a good Disk Wipe utility?

nzimmers · Post by **nzimmers** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 6:48 pm

I'm going to be selling 4 HDD's and I tried a utility that wrote 0's to all sectors, but when I used a program called "activeUndelete" (which rocks!) it was able to find stuff still on there and pull it off with ease

any suggestions? I need to totally wipe these things for good

protellect · Post by **protellect** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 7:17 pm

We used this at work

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Seemed to do a good enough job, and I'm sure with enough passes it shouldn't be a problem.

nzimmers · Post by **nzimmers** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 7:18 pm

thanks! I'll try it

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 1:13 am

Hello,

What utility did you use to put all zeros on them? Was it SpinRite?

nzimmers · Post by **nzimmers** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 1:17 am

NeilBlanchard wrote:Hello,

What utility did you use to put all zeros on them? Was it SpinRite?

it was called "zilla..." something or other

I ended up using a version of eraser that's free and worked well from http://www.heidi.ie that works in windows, but you still need to have the drive partitioned to use it, but it does have lots of options for what kind of wipe of freespace you want to do

have you used spinRite?

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 1:31 am

Hello,

nzimmers wrote:have you used spinRite?

Yes, but I have not checked to see if the data was recoverable -- for that I would have tried GetDataBack.

whiic · Post by **whiic** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 2:31 am

AIDA32 (freeware) or HDDScan (freeware) should be able to erase everything since it writes zeroes to physical devices instead of partitions. HDD doesn't need to be formatted or partitioned. Both run on Windows and use low-level access.

AIDA32 and HDDScan is available as freeware ONLY so you can be pretty sure it's not intentionally crippled to allow data to be recovered afterwards. If zerofill isn't safe enough, try some random bit data eraser. They have been designed for old drives that had wider track spacing and may have required several passes to ensure absolute certainty of erasure. Even one zerofill pass will erase an older drive (as well as a modern one) but deeper haxxoring to HDDs internal operation could still recover something using statistic methods and reading analogue signal from head instead of relying on binary output from interface. 3-pass random bit fill should be enough for even the most paranoid. I doubt if even NSA could recover from that hard drive.

Ultimate Boot CD (freeware) probably has at least one of such random bit fill utilities if not several.

If you're worried about regular curious buyers of snooping your pr0n, one pass zero fill is enough, as long as it really makes at least that one pass on every single sector. The lower the access level, the batter. Low level LBA access to physical device is better than erasing space reserved for a partition sized to "match" the full capacity. First, there's always a few MB unpartitioned, and high-level access may protect MBR, MFT, MFT mirror, log file, etc. from being zero-filled.

Also, do remember: if it's fast, it's cheating.

Felger Carbon · Post by **Felger Carbon** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 7:28 am

Software erase utilities are useful for protecting casual privacy needs.

If you have a serious need to not have the data propagated (or re-created) elsewhere, the only sensible solution is a sledgehammer. Use when the consequences outweigh the few McDonald's hamburgers you can get by selling a used hard drive.

karmasalad · Post by **karmasalad** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 7:43 am

nzimmers wrote:I'm going to be selling 4 HDD's and I tried a utility that wrote 0's to all sectors, but when I used a program called "activeUndelete" (which rocks!) it was able to find stuff still on there and pull it off with ease

any suggestions? I need to totally wipe these things for good

Check out Eraser. It includes several different methods for erasing data, including pseudorandom data, U.S. DoD level, Schneier's 7 pass, and Gutmann (35 whopping passes!).

cmthomson · Post by **cmthomson** » Sat Sep 15, 2007 5:16 pm

Eraser is the best software utility I've found. It has the option to write NIST-approved patterns the appropriate number of times to ensure that anyone other than NSA (or a few private firms) won't be able to recover the data.

That said, Felger is right: the only sure way to prevent recovery is to physically damage the disk. Government procedures for top secret or above involve hammers and flames.

syncmaster33 · Post by **syncmaster33** » Mon Sep 17, 2007 9:32 am

cmthomson wrote:Eraser is the best software utility I've found.

I would have to second this......

Zed Lopez · Post by **Zed Lopez** » Mon Sep 17, 2007 12:08 pm

Note that the disk wipe part of Eraser is DBAN, so the DBAN and Eraser recommendations are the same for this purpose (Eraser does other interesting things outside of DBAN's scope.)

Peter Gutmann did the seminal work on disk-wiping and his own advice is that the large number of wipes recommended for hardware of years gone by aren't relevant to modern drives. "A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected" is what he says in an epilogue to his original paper.

I still like to do an all-0 and all-1 pass before the all-random pass, but I know I'm being superstitious.

nzimmers · Post by **nzimmers** » Mon Sep 17, 2007 2:58 pm

Hey guys, thanks for all the replies...

if I was just trying to remove porn I wouldn't be concerned, that's why hitachi and segate make the big drives right?

I had personal data, tax returns, phone numbers, information about my daughter, basically everything you don't want to fall into the wrong hands.

Can someone recommend a good Disk Wipe utility?

Can someone recommend a good Disk Wipe utility?

Re: Can someone recommend a good Disk Wipe utility?