Hard drive Eraser

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kcmoguy26

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Hello, I have 3 hard drives i want to sell on ebay, but i want to make sure they are completley erased. What progrmas are out there to definitly get rid of eveything? Is there any free programs out there, or does anyone want to share one with me? thanks for the help
 
What about trying to format them twice?? :confused:
 
Thanks for the suggestion but i read somwhere that that doesnt work. formating doesnt really delete whats there it just tells the drive that that part can now be written over with other info. I think the hard drive eraser programs actually write bogus data to the drive like random 1's & 0's writting over everything so it cant be recovered.
 
big daddy said:
What about trying to format them twice?? :confused:
Click to expand...
Doesn't work. I could still get a ton of information from that.

Try Eraser. It's Free! I've used it to wipe hard drives a bunch of times. Once you download and install, click the Start button, go to Programs (or All Programs), point to the Eraser icon, and then click on the Create Nuke Boot Disk icon. You'll need to put in a floppy disk and it will write some information to the floppy so that you can use it to boot your computer to erase the hard drive contents.

To run it, shut down the computer, put the floppy in the floppy drive (make sure your computer is set to boot from floppy), and then plug in the hard drive you wish to wipe.

Be very careful and only plug in the hard drive you wish to wipe on the computer when you boot from the floppy. DISCONNECT any other hard drives for which you wish to keep data. All you need to do is type 'Autonuke' without the quotes and hit the Enter key on the keyboard. It will automatically overwrite the drive 7 times with random data then let you know when it is complete.

Any questions, just ask! :spoofee:
 
Dont do that anymore

Formating doesnt erase data, its still there. All formating does is tell the drive that area that had data can now be overwritten with somthing else. There are many programs for getting this info back easy. What you need to do is find an eraser that actually overwrites the data with random 1's and 0's this way your protected. I did some research on it.
 
1. Format
2. Create a batch job to create directories ("1", "2", "3", etc) and copy same huge files (movies, mp3, etc) in each directory until hard drive is full.
3. Format

Just a thought...
 
you could just put it inside a mattress NOT made for california or nevada and burn it :p
 
You can format it but there are unformat programs.

You can zero it, but a 120 gig hd might take 12 hours to do.

I prefer to fdisk, there aren't unfdisk programs, well, its not 100%....
 
kcmoguy26 said:
Formating doesnt erase data, its still there. All formating does is tell the drive that area that had data can now be overwritten with somthing else. There are many programs for getting this info back easy. What you need to do is find an eraser that actually overwrites the data with random 1's and 0's this way your protected. I did some research on it.
Click to expand...

Reallly good information.. This proves those CSI shows wrong.
I've seen an episode where someone has wrote over the hard drive 30+ times.. and the CSI agent said something like "we can get the data, it'll just take a bit."
 
To really get it deleted, delete it according to the Department of Defense (DoD) standard, DoD 5220.22-M. The program I recommended above will do that as the default. If the DoD uses it to wipe sensitive data off their disks, then I imagine it will work out for the average Joe.
 
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