Wiping data from HDD securely???

G

Germz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 14, 2007
Messages
164
Guys, I need to know if there is a way to wipe data from an HDD securily & without the possibility of recovery. I'm not talking about forensic recovery but recovery by other ordinary people. Reason i ask is because i want to sell an older formatted HDD online & i dont want others poking around in there. Not that i have sensitive info there but just prefer privacy. I personally recovered data from fully formatted drives myself for friends & such so i know how easy it is & anyone with basic pc skills can do it. Is there a program that can shred data relatively securily?
 
I remember one day at "Ye Olde Computer Workshop" when I ended up low level formatting some hard drive, at the behest of the owner, just before I ghosted an image onto it. Obviously a single low level zero write format isn't anything to write home about really, but what happened next is. After I ghosted the image from one drive on to the previously LL Formatted one and rebooted, guess what showed up?

...wait for it...

The previous contents of the entire drive, pre-LL Format, directory trees and file structures completely intact!
 
Pulse.01 said:
I remember one day at "Ye Olde Computer Workshop" when I ended up low level formatting some hard drive, at the behest of the owner, just before I ghosted an image onto it. Obviously a single low level zero write format isn't anything to write home about really, but what happened next is. After I ghosted the image from one drive on to the previously LL Formatted one and rebooted, guess what showed up?

...wait for it...

The previous contents of the entire drive, pre-LL Format, directory trees and file structures completely intact!
Click to expand...

lol @ your story

what i was referring to was is data recovery software. Some of em r quite good, they do a very detailed recovery right down to the folder & subfolder structure so everything on the HDD is right in the open.
 
DBAN is good. It just manually overwrites the entire drive with other data. There was a challenge a while back to recover data after just overwriting everything with a single pass of 0's, and nobody accepted that challenge. The prize was a pretty small amount of cash (much less than the equipment that would be needed to perform the recovery), but generally with challenges like that, someone will accept it if it's possible, regardless of whether or not they actually win a real prize. Heck, the fame from doing so is probably worth even more.

Secure Erase (the same thing used to reset SSDs) is basically the same thing, but it's built into the firmware of the drive. It can access areas of the drive that software can't, and is slightly faster because it's an internal command of the drive rather than software pushing random data onto the drive. You just need a tiny program to issue the proper command to the drive to start the function. To avoid viruses completely destroying all your data and such, you will often find a BIOS block of Secure Erase. You may have to hotplug the drive after bootup or try a different BIOS version to get it to allow Secure Erase.
 
Surprised no one posted the link to the 50 cal destroying 15 hard drives that was on front page a couple month ago :p
 
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