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Zeroing Hard Drives ???

Diablo2K

Diablo2K

Supreme [H]ardness
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I got a couple hard drives I would like to Zero (low level format). I would like to do it from within windows, these drives will be hooked up via a USB adapter. I would like to be able to do it several times without haveing to go in and start it over manually if possible. Are there any utilities out there that will do this?
I have never done it in DOS either so if I cant do it in windows how do I do it?
 
if pretty good privacy is still free, i believe it comes with a disk wipe utility (pgp disk).
 
What do you want to wipe the disks for? What do you mean by "I would like to be able to do it several times without haveing to go in and start it over manually"? You're going to be swapping disks physically, yes?

 
yeah, more info!

if you're getting rid of them (selling, gifts, whatever) i would do a better wipe than just a zero-fill. i use dban when i want to be reasonably sure no average joe will get my data, and a corporate internal wipe when i'm in a hurry and just need the disk cleared.

you could just load all those disks up in a machine by themselves (no OS or anything important), drop in dban and run autonuke. come back later and all the disks would be pretty clean.
 
I am wanting to sell some and give the others away. I had heard that Zeroing the drive 6 times was CIA standards for securing the data, but that was a long time ago and have not heard anything about securing hard drives so noone can access the data.
dban seems to be what I am looking for, thanks for the help guys!!!
 
The Ultimate Boot CD (www.ultimatebootcd.com) has a few tools for that, depending on the manufacturer of your hard drive.
I can't recall if you can access USB hard drives with UBCD, but if you can, or if you can install it in your PC as a secondary drive, some of the programs have an option where you can set a number of iterations for the process. Set up the process, let it run, and it should finish without you having to mess with it.
What is the manufacturer of your hard drives? Maxtor has a utility that you can boot from a floppy disk to do this kind of stuff, and I am sure other companies do the same.
Depending on the size of the drive and the number of times you want to do it, zeroing a drive may take a very, very, very, very long time. I'd give it a weekend for each drive depending on the iterations. (Especially if you want to do it 6 times, holy crap!)
 
just load them all up at once in the machine (with no important drives) and run dban on autonuke. it will get all of the drives at once, and is probably a lot more secure than zeroing.

if you're paranoid, run it twice.

http://dban.sourceforge.net
 
Writing zeroes to it once is plenty. No one is going to spend the thousands of dollars it would require to recover a fraction of a browser cache file you created in 2001. Don't worry about it.

And unless you work for the CIA/DEA/DHS/FBI, please stop spreading the rumors of how 'they' would wipe a drive. They're both not as secure as you think they are and a lot more secure than you could ever imagine, depending on the instance. And they don't just tell people how they handle wiping drives. So just quit it.
 
00ber_m00 said:
The government publishes its standards for wiping media.
Click to expand...

Perhaps this is true, but "I had heard that Zeroing the drive 6 times was CIA standards for securing the data" is hardly a source of factual information.

Remember that a lot of utilities claim to be "what the Government uses", but does anyone really think the Government uses 1,435 different applications to wipe drives?
 
I have never seen a drive classified SECRET or above wiped. They are all physically destroyed(shredded, or better).
 
Dew said:
I have never seen a drive classified SECRET or above wiped. They are all physically destroyed(shredded, or better).
Click to expand...

but why wouldnt they wipe em then shred em?
 
protias said:
but why wouldnt they wipe em then shred em?
Click to expand...

Because they typically degauss the shredded bits. Not only that, wiping is time consuming.
 
00ber_m00 said:
The government publishes its standards for wiping media.
Click to expand...
Link, please? 5220.22-M (here's another version) which all the data destruction companies are so proud of quoting doesn't say anything about "seven times" or anything like it - it doesn't even mention destroying mag tape! Unless I'm missing something here, they're all BSing. Their supposed "DoD wipe"s are all completely different:
  • "Overwrite all addressable locations with a character, its complement, then a random character and verify"
  • Each byte is first overwriten with 01010101. The second overwriting pass uses 10101010. This cycle is repeated three times. The final overwriting pass is performed with random bytes generated with an ANSI X9.17c keystream generator.
and other similarly handwaving ideas. One site even links to a current .mil site with a 5220.22-M that says nothing about disk wiping in the section that the site asserts.

Wiping is time consuming and pointless. Disks are cheap. Ergo, no federal agency I'm aware of overwrites disks; they destroy the physical media. They may remove the platters from the disks and shred only those, but that's labor-intensive and I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that they just chuck the drives into the shredder whole. Modern industrial shredders have no problems dealing with that ;)

 
Thanks U_mage for doing the homework. I visited many of the sites you posted looking for absolutes earlier as well, however I didn't post my findings. I do know that for any work I've done for Government agencies (not classified material) they have requested to have the drive returned rather than allow us to destroy it. From there I don't know what happens to it. An industrial shredder wins my vote for cost/performance ratio...though I'd bet they truck any materials needing to be destroyed to a facility that handles the operation. I've seen the videos posted here - it's mighty impressive.
 
When I worked at lockheed(about a year ago) the goverment standard is using GDISK to wipe it 3 times.
 
Wow, great links.
I'd hate to get my tie stuck in a hard drive shredder...:eek:
 
Thanks for the link! Where'd you find it? I went through a large, large number of links from Google, and didn't get anywhere
Click to expand...


I searched for a short quote from the 5220.22-m and restricted the results to .mil sites only.
 
I've received, for verification purposes, hard drives which have come from a civilian company that provides degaussing services to its (civilian) customers. So far no drive has been less than 100% recoverable. I think he officially stopped sending to us for verification recently. I have no idea what equipment he was using, but apparently it was not sufficient.
 
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