Delete data from Hard Drive

J

jrg70

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 23, 2004
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I have to RMA a drive back to Western Digital. It is still functional so I would like to wipe the thing clean of data first.

What do you guys recommend for doing such a thing? I would prefer a windows based solution. I would hook the drive up to a working PC as a second drive and go from there. I don't really want to make a boot disk and go that route.

Any suggestions?
 
Thanks for the quick replies.

Any idea how long it will take for a 1 TB drive?
 
Well I ran it and got the disk "clean".

I just did the autonuke option. It did 3 passes with 3 rounds in each pass! It took about 22 hours. I just set it up and walked away. I came back about 22 hours later, thinking it would be done, but it had about 5 minutes to go. Good timing I guess.

Anyway, thanks for the help. I feel pretty good about sending this thing back now. ;)
 
In the future, I suggest just to TrueCrypt the entire drive/partition if you have sensitive data that you think will be compromised in case of a physical hardware failure.
 
a single pass zero wirte would have been more than enough to secure the drive. WD isn't going to spend the time and money to scour a few random bits from the drive.
 
Interresting Software. Plus, it's free! I might have to download this and add this to my SW collection.
 
You dont need nsa quility erases for RMAs. If your tinfiol hat is getting warm, just write zeros to it or use a tape eraser near it.
 
I didn't know autonuke was going to do all the passes. But at least it's clean now. I doubt WD would spend a lot of time trying to get at my mp3s and family movies.

Anyway, thanks again.
 
Kritter said:
You dont need nsa quility erases for RMAs. If your tinfiol hat is getting warm, just write zeros to it or use a tape eraser near it.
Click to expand...

It's not about the NSA aspect... its about speed. Secure erase is faster than almost any software driven solution as well as being a better solution as well. Thats because its hardware driven not software. Multiple Block overwrites would be something like DBAN.

ccmrsecureerase.gif


Ref: http://storagesecrets.org/2009/01/dod-secure-erase/
 
hmchk said:
It's not about the NSA aspect... its about speed. Secure erase is faster than almost any software driven solution as well as being a better solution as well. Thats because its hardware driven not software. Multiple Block overwrites would be something like DBAN.

http://storagesecrets.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/ccmrsecureerase.gif

Ref: http://storagesecrets.org/2009/01/dod-secure-erase/
Click to expand...

Secure erase is such a joke. There is absolutely nothing out there that can recover more than a few random bytes after a zero wipe. Even getting the data that you can would take prohibitively expensive equipment, thorough knowledge of exactly how the heads track (every disk is different), and lots of time. After that, there's still not any way to tell the bits are from the same write procedure or not. If data recovery specialists won't touch a drive that's zeroed, Mr, Basement Hacker certainly isn't going to be any more sucessful.
 
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