Good program for effortlessly, freely, and securely wiping a HDD?

[Gorgonzola]

Can anyone recommend a good and free application for securely wiping a SATA HDD?

I want to send a dodgy HDD back to the manufacturer for replacement but would like to make sure my data cannot be retrived.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

 

[Vesper8]

i believe a full format does the trick. A quick format only wipes the MFT table but the files remain there.. ready to be overwritten.. But I think a full format actually writes every bit on the drive.

Of course if you're returning it that probably means you've got bad sectors ? And a full format will likely trip one of those bad sectors and trigger a blue screen crash. That's gonna be a problem with any 'wiping' utility though. But at least you can mess up enough of the bits so your data is nearly impossible to retrieve.

Sorry but I don't know of any software that is meant to do just that but a quick google search brought up a lot of potential results : http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=wiping+hard+drive+data&meta=

 

[Zugzwang152]

Full format will write zeroes to the drive. You can use a Windows CD, or the hard drive manufacturer's bootable utility to do this.

If you want some more secure (and time consuming), check out DBAN: http://dban.sourceforge.net/

 

[alzan]

Full format does not make the files unrecoverable, all you need is the right software to recover the files. Killdisk does a good job, but the files can be recovered by the Unreaser version of killdisk.

As suggested, use the manufacturers zero-fill utilities.

alzan

 

[rstrohkirch]

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

The number of re-writes can be adjusted IIRC...you could do 50 0/1 fills if you really wanted

 

[Kevin1211]

Darik's Boot and Nuke

 

[kamper]

I was gonna suggest a hammer, but the manufacturer probably would be less enthusiastic about sending you a replacement in that case

 

[Pabster]

Originally posted by: Kevin1211
Darik's Boot and Nuke

:thumbsup:

Been using it for a long time. Great stuff.

 

[KoolDrew]

Originally posted by: Kevin1211
Darik's Boot and Nuke

:thumbsup:

 

[Gorgonzola]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I'll give Darik's Boot and Nuke a shot.