Easy way to verify HDD was wiped with 0s?

[jrichrds]

I have a stack of hard drives of which I've forgotten if they've all been wiped or not. Non-critical data, so I just used fast wipe with 0s. Is there some Windows utility that lets me verify all sectors are written with 0s instead of having to re-wipe the drives?

 

[John Connor]

Good question. What you need is a BSD checksum program to verify that all of the data on the drive equals 0. Unfortunately I can't find a program to do that.

The only thing I can come up with is to try and run Recuva on the drive and retrieve files. If it can't your golden.

 

[Mark R]

A scan to confirm the drive is filled with zeros, will take about the same time as wiping a drive with zeros.

Might as well just rewipe.

 

[BrightCandle]

A scan to confirm the drive is filled with zeros, will take about the same time as wiping a drive with zeros.

Might as well just rewipe.

To determine its been wiped to zeros do you need to read the entire contents or just some parts of it? You don't really need to check every byte to determine its been wiped to zero, if the first 100MB doesn't contain anything that is highly indicative that the drive has been wiped. Its considerably quicker to check that (all be it with a linux script) than rewriting the entire drive. But whether you can do such a check is very skill dependent, and if you don't know how then you are best off waiting for the write of zeros again.

 

[mikeymikec]

Do the drives need to work afterwards?

If not, wield the mighty sledgehammer of data erasure aloft and give those drives some percussive maintenance that they'll never forget.

 

[Charlie98]

Use a program like Acronis True Image. In the utilities you can 'view current state of your disks' and go into each disk and see what is written. I use it to check when I zero out a drive for resale or disposal.

FWIW, if you have a WD drive, you can download a free, limited functionality copy of Acronis to use, or you can find it very often on sale for less than $20.

 

[Elixer]

You can use disk edtiors to randomly hop around the HD, and see what is written on the sector.

Like this one: http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

An electromagnet is your friend.

 

[Sequences]

Write a very large file that fills the space.

 

[PhIlLy ChEeSe]

http://www.majorgeeks.com/mg/sortname/cleaners.html

 

[ch33zw1z]

DBAN dod 3 pass seems to work or me. Guess that just wipes though, doesn't really "check for 0's"

 

[Essence_of_War]

'dd' or 'ddrescue' the first couple of gigs to a file, and either pipe the file through gzip, or zip it after you finish. If the resulting file is realllly small compared to the amount you dd'd, you'll know it's almost certainly compressed down zeros.