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Does formatting external hard drive erase everything?

E

Elaineazly

Junior Member
I have a old external hard drive and wanna to sell it, but there are many business document in it, even I deleted them and formatted my drive, but I still worry about that someone could retrieve my data with some program data recovery, so, I was wondering how to completely erase external hard drive without recovery?
 
You want disk wipe, zero-fill or zero-write. Some times it's called "low level format" but that has been a misnomer for a long time and has fallen out of favor. If it's an external (removable storage) drive, there shouldn't be a problem using an app from Windows as opposed to booting into some special boot environment/disk:

Eraser

DBAN

Active @ Kill Disk

You do NOT need the "secure" multi-pass with pseudorandom overwrite stuff. That can take days on larger hard disks. All that is needed is one pass of zeroes to be written to all sectors.
 
You forgot, CCleaner has a "Wipe Free Space" feature, as well as Windows 7 or newer has DISKPART.EXE, with a "CLEAN ALL" command. (Be careful, that will zero-wipe the currently-selected disk. Make sure to LIST DISK,. and SELECT DISK before doing CLEAN!)
 
You can put some useless documents into your external drive, These documents should excess the amount of your original documens. Then delete these useless documents. ok,that's it.
 
I've always just written zeros to a drive, but have never really had much I was overly worried about.

Have even did that in the past on a few RAID drives when rebuilding them myself.
 
A data recovery program will be able to recover files from a formatted drive. The formatting process deletes the files yes. But doesn't overwrite them. Even after formatting the files should still be there, available for recovery.
 
Fill the drive with large files like blu-ray movies. Do it 2-3 times. This should be fine. Or write random data to the drive with erasing programs.
 
I have a old external hard drive and wanna to sell it...

Depending on how old it is, how many hours are on it, and how big it is... it may not even be worth the effort.

I use Acronis to write zeros over mine... seems to work well enough, and I have proprietary business data on mine as well.
 
tcsenter said:
You want disk wipe, zero-fill or zero-write. Some times it's called "low level format" but that has been a misnomer for a long time and has fallen out of favor. If it's an external (removable storage) drive, there shouldn't be a problem using an app from Windows as opposed to booting into some special boot environment/disk:

Eraser

DBAN

Active @ Kill Disk

You do NOT need the "secure" multi-pass with pseudorandom overwrite stuff. That can take days on larger hard disks. All that is needed is one pass of zeroes to be written to all sectors.
Click to expand...

this program is free? and will 100% wiper my data without recovery? Thanks!
 
Dick2016 said:
You can put some useless documents into your external drive, These documents should excess the amount of your original documens. Then delete these useless documents. ok,that's it.
Click to expand...

You mean that ways can overwrite the data? I don't think this is a good way!
 
Once a drive's byte-space has been over-written with Zero "from front to back" -- maybe a $25-50K data recovery hardware process can read the prior "corner residuals" and get bits and pieces back. Much like going to an auto junkyard, and putting a wrecked and scattered car pieces onto a tarp.
 
It sounds kinda dumb but what I will do is simply copy a video or other large file onto the drive, then simply hold CTRL and then press A-V-C a bunch of times. The drive will fill up with a bunch of copies of the same file. Once the message pops up that there is no more space, you just do a quick format. You can have complete confidence that you know all your old data has been overwritten. It is really simple and easy to do and doesnt require any 3rd party software.
 
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