How to completely wipe drive?

[Wynd]

To make a long story short, I want to wipe my drive. How do you do this? I was thinking you could just write zeros over the first 512 bytes or whatever the partition table is to make it appear as if there are no partitions. Any comments/ideas?

[ricmitch_uk]

The simplest way, is to boot up with a boot floppy (copy a file called fdisk.exe on to first), run that, and delete your partition. Then just plonk an OS on to it.

If you want to completely wipe a drive, without leaving any of the data for prying eyes to look at, then you want to wipe it, and then overwrite it with random data, and then wipe it again. There are programs to do this, but I can't think of any offhand. Just search on Download.com or something.

HTH

[markman]

on take a HUGE electromagnetic gizmo and blast the hell out of it

[tr0n]

apparently, the british army sandblast their hard drives when they're finished with them

[HarryW]

Looks like you want a disk shredder app.

This one is a 10-use trial. Not sure how it's supposed to count the number of uses if it's shredding your disk - I guess it must store it somewhere on your disk.

There are quite a few more on download.com, so take a look. If you have (or can get) the McAffee utilities set, there is one in there too that will shred a whole disk.

[Gandalf_Grey_]

BC wipe works well but it would take like a day

[Emo]

heh, that's easy....
1) Start
2) Run
3) Type: Deltree \y C:\*.*
4)

-Emo

[Wynd]

So i would have to wipe the whole drive? I can't just do part of it?

[HarryW]

There are loads of shredder apps that will delete individual files or directories, if that's what you want. They're much more common than those that shred a whole drive.

Just go to download.com and search for "file shredder" or "drive shredder" or whatever you're looking for.

[Tygur]

Just boot off a floppy or cd and remove the partitions with fdisk. That should be good enough.

[markman]

or put it in lava. Whatever works best for you, and has the security you need

[Zaei]

It would be easy to write a program to do it for you.

Sub ShredFile(file as String)
  Dim l as Long
  l = FIleLen(s)
  Dim i as Long
  Dim b as Byte
  Open s For Binary As #1
  For i = 0 to l - 1
     b = CByte(Rnd() * 255)
     Put 1, , b
  Next i
  Close #1
  Kill s
End Sub

Just supply a filename... it should work.

Z.

[JoshT]

The floppy that comes with WD Drives can write zeroes over the entire drive, IIRC. I suppose if you're really paranoid, alternate writing zeroes, then ones, about a dozen times.

Then again, if you can get a little sand or dust inside the drive, it'll make a cool grinding noise.

[HarryW]

Decent shredder apps write a random zero or one over each bit a random number of times, though. it might write a zero, then a zero, then a one, then a zero, then a one. Or it might just write a one. The point in that is that the amount of residual magnetism is ever so slightly different depending on whether the bit was previously a one or a zero. So you can write zeros to the whole drive, but with the right equipment you can still tell what was there before. Of course, that's irrelevant unless you've got really sensitive data that you're trying to hide from someone with lots of resources (like the police).

[scoutt]

FYI:

the government has programs that can go down 11 levels on your hard drive, so unless you were very thorough to get all of it, it wouldn't make any difference. just take a floppy and fdisk it and format it. the other stuf isn't really necissary. they will get you anyway

[Gandalf_Grey_]

so do it 11 times. makes data cmpletely unrecoverable

[markman]

what exactly does formatting do?

cant you make an assembly proggy to write all bytes on a drive to 0, then format?

[HarryW]

Formatting is just writing the bare essentials of a file system, the file allocation table. The table exists at the beginning of the partition, and contains information about the names and addresses of each file on the partition. Formatting doesn't remove any data from the disk, it just overwrites the table.

Re: writing all bytes as 0.... read my previous post, and scoutt's.