Need good software to blow away a HDD.

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Proxy

Pumpkin Ghost
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Apr 24, 2005
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Can anyone recommend a good piece of software that can wipe out a HDD, but keep it functional enough to format again? Keep in mind the HDD in question has some very sensitive data on it. Thanks!
 
Duh, ok, who was the manufacture of your hard drive. They have software to 0 format the drive.
 
Still not good enough. I need something that can write passes of 1's and 0's over the drive. We had a floppy (I don't know where it went) that we could set to say government level security. I would take almost a day for it to finish, but when it was done, there was not way to recover any data off the drive. Some of our drives we physically destroy.
 
Okay. I suggest physical destruction, unless apparently you want to be able to sell it or something.
 
Eraser (based on DBAN), or DBAN itself, Active KillDisk as mentioned also. All get the job done to at least DoD wiping standards or even higher, and all are free.
 
GJSNeptune said:
Okay. I suggest physical destruction, unless apparently you want to be able to sell it or something.
Click to expand...

This drive wants to be kept in the computer it is in now, so it can be kept in the office as a spare VMWare machine.
 
Fire and sledgehammers are the only secure ways to get rid of sensitive data, it will be recoverable to some extent by any other form of erasure.
 
only one command can do it

dd

http://16systems.com/zero/index.html
A challenge to confirm whether or not a professional, established data recovery firm can recover data from a hard drive that has been overwritten with zeros once. We used the 32 year-old Unix dd command using /dev/zero as input to overwrite the drive. Three data recover companies were contacted. All three are listed on this page. Two companies declined to review the drive immediately upon hearing the phrase 'dd', the third declined to review the drive after we spoke to second level phone support and they asked if the dd command had actually completed (good question). Here is their response... paraphrased from a phone conversation:

"According to our Unix team, there is less than a zero percent chance of data recovery after that dd command. The drive itself has been overwritten in a very fundamental manner. However, if for legal reasons you need to demonstrate that an effort is being made to recover some or all of the data, go ahead and send it in and we'll certainly make an effort, but again, from what you've told us, our engineers are certain that we cannot recover data from the drive. We'll email you a quote."
Click to expand...
 
Proxy said:
Still not good enough. I need something that can write passes of 1's and 0's over the drive. We had a floppy (I don't know where it went) that we could set to say government level security. I would take almost a day for it to finish, but when it was done, there was not way to recover any data off the drive. Some of our drives we physically destroy.
Click to expand...

As others have said dban can do drive wiping to the dod standard. Takes a while.

Personally if it is that big of a deal I'd destroy the disk.
 
I used Autoclave for a long time, replaced with DBAN when the first one failed to detect some sata drives :(
 
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