Hard drive eraser

[net_user]

I'm lookin for a good hard drive eraser to format hardrives...

i'm not talkin about using fdisk, or disk management to delete the partions and create..ect....

a utility that wrights 1's and 0's on the sectors to destroy data.

i found a utility at www.killdisk.com

it works pretty good....but lookin around....

what do you all use?

[Zxian]

Eraser

[FrankE9999]

Eraser works good if you want to erase the blank space, slack space or specific files. To wipe the complete drive try Dariks Boot and Nuke (DBAN) http://dban.sourceforge.net/

[Guest Jlo555]

DiskEraser. It's proven to be very effective, though I think I did it too many times on my maxtor 60gig, because it doesn't really work that well anymore. As for the program, it runs pretty well, just boot from the floppy, and choose if you want single pass, tripple pass, or like 8 pass, or manual configuration (0-99 passes.) It takes a very long time, though. If you do over 3 passes, it'll most likely take over 20 hours + data verification. I don't remember what company produced the application, but you could probably just google it.

[net_user]

though I think I did it too many times on my maxtor 60gig, because it doesn't really work that well anymore.

i wonder if you "erase" the disk to many times, will it cause it's performance to degrade?

not talkin about formating...but sector by sector data eraseing.

[Guest Jlo555]

In my experience, yeah, it will degrade the performance. I did this several times with a maxtor 60gig and another maxtor 120gig. The 60gig doesn't really work that well, (just really slow) and the 120gig still runs pretty well. I think that when the program is erasing the disk it pushes the whole hard drive to its limits and possibly wears out the motor somehow, because it keeps the program keeps going for at least 12 hours (for a tripple pass, 60gb.) The bigger the drive, the longer it takes in my experience, but it works. When I installed windows on the drive after the erase, windows detected it as a new hard drive in setup or said that I erased it.

[army20]

take a magnet

[suryad]

System Mechanic has a Drive Scrubber.....works good.

[DL.]

Any utility with the ability to do a low-level format will probably do just fine.

There are a number of such utilities on the Ultimate Boot CD (free).

Edited October 28, 2005 by DL.

[ChunkDog]

I've been using this for a while now, and it's been awsome so far, and it's free.

[dirtwarrior]

Dont use a magnet. It will ruin the HD. Please dont suggest things such as this, someone will ruin HD because they will think its good info.

[net_user]

Dont use a magnet. It will ruin the HD. Please dont suggest things such as this, someone will ruin HD because they will think its good info.

no kiddin...i'm not talking about "DESTROYING" the hard drive here...lol

just to wipe the data off...and reuse.

[At0mic]

I find this always works for destroying data

[dirtwarrior]

OK just find a utility to use there are many out there. Remember if you use one within windows it wont clean your page files and boot sectors. The ones which you boot off of will clean everything, but it takes a long time.

If you have a resident virus to get rid of, after you write HD back to 0's usplug memory for about 30 seconds or so.

[cluberti]

I'd recommend Active@KillDisk (http://www.killdisk.com), but googling "DOD Wipe" will find you lots of tools that may meet your requirement.