Need to COMPLETELY wipe out harddrive.

A

amdworld

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Mar 24, 2005
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I'm selling my laptop, and I'm about to reinstall windows, but I need a software that can COMPLETELY erase EVERYTHING.

Free would be better...
I have the dell os installation CD, but not sure if that'll do it.
Just wondering, any opinions?
Can the dell os installation CD rid of EVERYTHING?
Of should I get a software? If so, please recommend me one.. I'm willing to pay, but not that much.
 
Try cipher -w in Windows (only applies to Pro versions)

Also, there is always the option of disintergating the physical disk media :)
 
dban and autoclave will do the trick. Both are available on the ultimate boot disc.
 
If you have to DL something I'd just get the ultimate boot CD, but if you have a Linux installation disk lying around the destructive bad block check on a Linux boot disk should do it as well. No need for the whole set of disks, just disk 1. The badblocks program will overwrite the entire drive with four different bit patterns- 0xaa, 0x55, 0xff, and 0x00 if you run it with the destructive write test flag. The catch is it's slow, since it'll read the entire disk four times as well to look for bad blocks.

On a laptop the HD should pretty much always be the first ATA device, so
badblocks -w /dev/hda

The installation disks for some distros may create the device files in a different place. RedHat, for example, seemes to like to make them in /tmp. Or at least it did the last time I needed to mess with a disk from the installer CD, around RedHat 9 or so. So /tmp/hda. I'd assume Fedora is probably similar. I also had to either make the devices myself or go through the installer until I got to the disk partitioning screen.
 
killdisk.exe is DOD standard.

it wipes out everything....

so does a magnet / or rubber mallet.

QM
 
You should also be able to do a low-level format from your BIOS, that should just write 0s to the disc, and render any data unreadable.
 
NulloModo said:
You should also be able to do a low-level format from your BIOS, that should just write 0s to the disc, and render any data unreadable.
Click to expand...

You cannot do a low level format on any semi-modern hard drives. You can do a zero-fill which writes 0's to the HDD, but not a LLF.

You'll want to do more than one zero fill incase it missed any sectors on the first pass. This is where DBAN and Autoclave type programs come in handy. They can do 0 fills, random data passes, write all 1's so that every sector is almost guaranteed to be overwritten.

Realistically a 0 fill is probably all you need. But it's fun to be paranoid. :D Nothing like letting your computer run for 30 hours doing 10 different passes. :cool:
 
quasimodem said:
killdisk.exe is DOD standard.

it wipes out everything....

so does a magnet / or rubber mallet.

QM
Click to expand...

killdisk on a bootable flash drive is what i've been using. DBAN and Autoclave are likely more thorough because you can only do one pass using the free version of killdisk but one time writing zeros to a hard drive is really all you need when your just going to sell your hard drive unless it had alot of sensitive data on it.
 
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