Erase A HDD for sale?

[Ranulf]

Also try this program: Eraser

 

[Jhhnn]

As has been suggested, go to the maxtor site and download their bootable utility, PowerMaxExe, use it to write the drive to zeroes. It's now a separate utility from Maxblast.. You can also use it to test/format the drive, offering a clean and honest product to the buyer.

If you've found the paranoia to be contagious, download and run DBAN, Darik's boot and nuke- be warned that this is a dangerous utility, it will utterly and indiscriminately wipe every drive in your box. Set it to kill, go to bed, wake up empty. Short of the NSA, nobody's getting anything off of that drive afterwards....

 

[Jeff7]

Link to Maxtor's FAQ page on their zero write utility. Really though, the freeware utilities linked to here should be fine; heck, even just format c: /u should do the job just fine. If someone really wanted the data off your hard drive, you probably couldn't stop them, short of destroying the drive. What I usually do is first do format x: /u and then run ZAP on the drive. ZAP just is a little utility from IBM, a single .COM file, that wipes out all partition and file allocation data on a drive. Just be sure that you use it on the correct drive; type zap /? to see the syntax instructions. Safest thing to do is have only the drive to be erased hooked to the computer.

Originally posted by: MachFive
Hard drives are like etch-a-sketches. All ya gotta do is hold them upside down and shake vigorously.

Hey, if you do it hard enough, the data won't be readable.

 

[oldfart]

The thing with the Maxtor, WD, etc utilities is they only work on their own drives. Killdisk will work with any brand drive. They do the same thing. They write 0s to the drive.

 

[eklass]

Originally posted by: andrey
do you guys really believe someone will be buying 20Gb hard drive with the purpose of recovering what's there and is is even worth it? Just do a format C: and you're good to go. I mean seriously, don't be so paranoid!

there was an article on slashdot quasi-recently about some university students that did just that

 

[AtomicDude512]

Originally posted by: BmXStuD
1.Go to makers website
2. Find the program that will write 0's to it and use that program to FORMAT it back to the way that the MANF. formatted it .(low format i think)

Perfect!

 

[thorin]

Isn't there a GNU Utility for this purpose? I remember someone linked it before but now I can't find it.

Thorin

 

[Wipeout667]

I'd recommend using Eraser on a disk that isn't your master boot disk. There's also a utility, BCWipePD that you can throw on a boot floppy/CD to wipe the drive as well.

I had to do a data recovery project on a drive a few months ago and used Ontrack's Easy Recovery. It worked great, so I experimented and tried to pull data off a drive that had been formatted /u and even had another OS installed on it. Amazingly, I could still pull data off from the first OS.

LINKS:
BCWipePD
Eraser
Ontrack EasyRecovery