Best Program for Wiping a Hard Drive prior to a reformat

[DDrasus]

Whats the best? looking to bring my raptor back to factory fresh condition (ie all 0's) Thanks

[djnes]

Gdisk is my personal favorite for clearning a drive for a fresh install.

[MorfiusX]

What reason do you have for this? Are you do this for security purposes? If not, then why bother. If you are selling the HD you would need to do this. But, if you are just re-installing the OS, then what's the point?

[SkaarjMaster]

How about a strong magnet?;)

[burningrave101]

Go to Western Digital's website and look for a utility to do a low level format with. It will write all zero's to the hard drive and make it factory new. A low level format will take a while to run but it completely erases any traces of anything on the drive.

[DDrasus]

i looked ive used IBM's utility before to do this, but WD dosent seem to provide one on their site. Is Gdisk free and where can i find it?

[FX25]

DNX

[SkaarjMaster]

hehe, sorry about the dumb a$$ comment.;)

Anyway, one of those utilities at WD does write zeros to your HD, but I can't remember which one.

[djnes]

Gdisk is part of Norton Ghost, which everyone should have already. And WD definitely has a tool on their site.

[EnderW]

http://support.wdc.com/download/#diagutils

I've used AutoClave and DBAN. I couldn't get AutoClave to run, so I used DBAN, which worked great but it took 20 hours for a 120GB drive - which I heard was probably due to some weird bug with Intel brand motherboards.

[wipeout833]

AutoClave and DBAN I have used both programs and they both worked just fine. Also WD format program is also a good program.

[Party2go9820]

Originally posted by burningrave101
Go to Western Digital's website and look for a utility to do a low level format with. It will write all zero's to the hard drive and make it factory new. A low level format will take a while to run but it completely erases any traces of anything on the drive.

Grrr.... Please stop passing along this crap. A low level fomat has nothing to do with zeros. A low level format is only done at the factory - no end user has done an actual low level format for over 5 years. Low level formating sets the sector size on the platters which on all modern drives is done at the factory and never changed. Doing a ture low level format on any drive manufactured in the last 5 years will destroy it beyond repair. (Sorry, a pet peev of mine)

Zeroing a drive writes zeros to all the sectors of the drive helping to truely delete information and protect the data from being resurected. Writing zero's is ok for data destruction, but a few random passes of 1s and 0s is much better. Autoclave is an excellent utility for this.

If the drive isn't leaving your hands, a regular format will always completely blank a drive. There is no need to zero it.

[DDrasus]

Can someone please tell me how to write the drive to 0's with a western digital utility? I have looked everywhere to no avail. Thanks

[djnes]

It's the read/write test. You'll know because it will worn you that it will over-write the data. As said before, if your not selling the drive, who gives a crap. That's why I suggested gdisk. It will wipe the drive clean for a fresh install in about 2 seconds.

[kronchev]

why are you doing this again? if its for security, it can be recovered even if you write all 0's over it. if its to clean it, big deal, fdisk does just as well, so does XP's disk manager.

[djnes]

Originally posted by kronchev
XP's disk manager.

Won't work if it's his system drive, which assuming from his sig, it is.

[morinaga]

If you're keeping the drive then there's no practical reason to implement a Department of Defense sanitation strategy to bring your hard drive to a "factory fresh" condition. The computer could care less if there's a 1 or a 0 written to the platter it won't effect the performance of your drive.

All you want to do is wipeout the Master Boot Record (MBR. IE the table of contents of the drive. Several programs can do this and it takes about two seconds). Install your OS, defrag and you're back in business. Writing all zeros to your hard drive for performance won't do anything but will sanitize your hardware from someone who wanted to pull up information after it's left your hot little hands.

Back in the day we used to write a huge sector of data to a drive to force the swap file to the outter tracks of a platter but I believe that practice is outdated to the point of ineffectiveness.

[Met-AL]

Originally posted by Party2go9820
Grrr.... Please stop passing along this crap. A low level fomat has nothing to do with zeros. A low level format is only done at the factory - no end user has done an actual low level format for over 5 years. Low level formating sets the sector size on the platters which on all modern drives is done at the factory and never changed. Doing a ture low level format on any drive manufactured in the last 5 years will destroy it beyond repair. (Sorry, a pet peev of mine)



I did one just last week....all though it was with the BIOS on a HP/Adaptec SCSI card on a HP SCSI drive. Had some errors on the drive that a regular format wouldn't take care off. Low level format cleared them up.

[Met-AL]

Here is a link to a program from Gateway called GWSCAN (http://support.gateway.com/support/drivers/getFile.asp?now=1&id=19282) .

Supports: All Operating Systems
Note: This utility will attempt to read a hard drive, write zeros to it, and measure seek times and data transfer rates. It also will repair certain issues with Gateway IDE hard drives. This should be used on all IDE hard drives that are larger than 10 gig. If the IDE hard drive is 10 gig or smaller, please use gwscan 3.15. Before opening the file, please insert a blank diskette into the floppy drive that has not been formatted in Windows XP, Windows 2000 or Windows NT.

[burningrave101]

Originally posted by Party2go9820
Grrr.... Please stop passing along this crap. A low level fomat has nothing to do with zeros. A low level format is only done at the factory - no end user has done an actual low level format for over 5 years. Low level formating sets the sector size on the platters which on all modern drives is done at the factory and never changed. Doing a ture low level format on any drive manufactured in the last 5 years will destroy it beyond repair. (Sorry, a pet peev of mine)

Zeroing a drive writes zeros to all the sectors of the drive helping to truely delete information and protect the data from being resurected. Writing zero's is ok for data destruction, but a few random passes of 1s and 0s is much better. Autoclave is an excellent utility for this.

If the drive isn't leaving your hands, a regular format will always completely blank a drive. There is no need to zero it.

http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/low-level-format.html

I realize that it technically its not a low level format and its a zero fill diagnostic utility but most people still call it a low level format because it does essentially the same thing.

When most users today talk about "low-level formatting" a drive, what they are really talking about is doing a zero-fill. That procedure will restore a functional drive (that is, one that does not have mechanical problems) to the condition it was in when received from the factory. There are occasions when a modern hard disk can become so badly corrupted that the operating system cannot recover it, and a zero-fill can help in this situation. Stubborn boot sector viruses for example can be hard to eradicate without resorting to low-level intervention. Since the zero-fill cleans all programs and data off the drive it will get rid of almost any data-related problem on the drive, such as viruses, corrupted partitions and the like. Just remember that it's a bit like burning down your house to get rid of termites: you lose everything on the drive.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/geom/formatUtilities-c.html

Sometimes a low level format or the technically correct term of zero filling the hard drive is needed to restore the hard drive especially after a bad virus. A normal reformat wont fix the problem sometimes. And it wont permanently erase what was on the drive. A normal format just hides the data. It doesn't write over it.

And you need to download the utility for your specific drive when doing a low level format. Its not recommended to do it with other utilities not specifically made for that hard drive.

http://support.wdc.com/download/dlg/dlgdiag11.zip