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Selling a laptop. Need to wipe the drive. What program?
Esh
Tending bar. FFXIV. Motorcycles.Portland, ORRegistered User regular
Tending bar. FFXIV. Motorcycles.Portland, ORRegistered User regular
So, I'm selling my old Sony Vaio and I need to wipe the HD with 1s and 0s. Any recommendations? Something that be used from Windows Vista preferably? Thanks!
Esh on
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http://www.dban.org/download
Boot it off of a USB drive and it will wipe every drive you have.
Their site seems to be having some issues.
I found it over on Cnet. It doesn't seem to want to install to my USB Drive though...
Yeah, it's making it through to the end of the install and then says "Error. Do you want to retry?"
Anyone have any other suggestions?
Just delete the current partition table and reformat the hard drive 6 times.
I was hoping for something a little less time consuming.
High-powered magnet?
I have not used this software myself, but it is free:
http://eraser.heidi.ie/
The version on CNET is only for a bootable CD. Burn the ISO to a CD and boot from that.
Quick warning, though. DBAN is very, very thorough, but it is not fast.
No, CNET has both the USB/Floppy and CD version. Do a search for Darik.
Eraser appears to be for specific files.
I just did this to an old laptop and a couple of hard drives with a Knoppix boot disk and the 'shred' utility, which is fine if you're a Linux person, but it sounds like you aren't. I was very surprised that the operation was CPU-bound rather than I/O-bound for the random passes. Whatever algorithm was generating all that random data was a CPU hog. The zero-fill pass was much faster, and I/O-bound as I would expect. YMMV with other solutions and more modern hardware than the old stuff I was paving.
It's the primary purpose, but it can do entire drives as well. Never used it for that myself though.
I'm assuming Fast. It's the only button that was available and it took no time at all.
There has got to some sort of other program out there for a full HD wipe. Anyone? Anyone?
1) It is still pretty much theory. Nobody has ever really done this "in the wild".
2) It is enormously expensive, requiring taking apart the disc and using sophisticated technology to recover/interpolate the previous states of the bits.
3) That when this type of recovery was talked about was a pretty long time ago in computer terms, and discs of today's density and technology would make it even more difficult.
Basically, quit being so paranoid. Unless you have a well funded research center or a government agency after your shit, you're wasting your time. And in at least one of those cases, we shouldn't be helping you anyway.
For more info, read this thread.
Specifically this post by DriverGuru and this one by rekrul.
Wow.Thanks. I'm not being paranoid. I actually have kept sensitive documents and what not on this computer. Not just photos of my cat.
Best description of a fast format ever.
It's been debunked. http://www.springerlink.com/content/408263ql11460147/
Basically if you overwrite the data once, you have a fairly good chance of finding a single bit, but any more than a couple and it's worthless.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQYPCPB1g3o
Some hard drive manufacturers make applications (on disk images or not) that can be used to zero-fill their drives. Look up who made the HD in your laptop, or just try some from different companies - Seagate and Western Digital have downloads on their websites, I believe.
All this business about multiple formats and having to overwrite everything fifty times is bullshit. It's based on a misunderstanding of a research paper written years ago stating that it might be possible to recover data after a single pass, but it's all theoretical - It has NEVER actually been done ever.
none of this csi/law and order buullssshiiit were they recover all my kiddy porn with a few easy clicks?
I do this because it's twice as fun to watch that progress bar as leveling another alt in World of Warcraft.
The US government mandates formatting 6 times before you get rid of a hard drive or plan to sell it. I used to recover information from formatted hard drives using several data recovery tools back in the nineties.
That's more the result of bureaucracy than anything else. They once required all software projects to be written in Ada, but that doesn't mean it's a good language. Governments have all kinds of retarded policies.
Recoverable data is the result of poor formatting - leaving the data and only wiping the file tables (as happens with a quick format for example). Once the data itself has actually been overwritten it's gone. Getting it back, even in theory requires dismantling the drive and examining the platters with an electron microscope and rebuilding the data a single bit at a time. If you can get the data back with software then it was never really wiped in the first place - nobody has ever recovered data that was actually overwritten.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Data-Wiping-Myth-Put-to-Rest-102376.shtml