Need a complete hard drive delete.

[Theguynextdoor]

I have a good HD already and the one I want to format is already hooked up. Is there a program that runs in windows that can COMPLETELY format the HD. I already used windows to do it, but I want something to comfort my paranonia a little more.

 

[Tyrant222]

partition magic 8

 

[Reiniku]

Originally posted by: Tyrant222
partition magic 8

 

[mechBgon]

Use DBAN. Standard US Department Of Defense method ought to ease your mind a bit, but it can go further than that if you've got the time 🙂 Expect the seven-pass DOD method to take... quite a while. I would launch it before going to bed. 😉 Also, don't have any other drives in the system that you don't want nuked.

 

[mechBgon]

Oh, and if you want something you can run in Windows, let's say the blanked drive is drive letter F:. Remove all data from F: and then use this command:

cipher /w:F:\

This overwrites all the free space on F: with three layers of encrypted junk, then deletes it all. Not positive, but I believe this would only work if the partition is using the NTFS file system. Probably not as good as DBAN, but I've tried picking up anything off of a drive using PC Inspector file-recovery software after doing a cipher run, and it wasn't coming up with anything but gibberish files.

edit: cipher doesn't take as long as DBAN, about 1 minute per GB on my 15000rpm SCSI drive. It is also safe to run on your C:\ drive, since it only does its thing on whatever space is blank.

 

[Theguynextdoor]

Awesome thanks guys, I'll run cipher. Also after i run cipher can i install an OS on that HD later on?

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Theguynextdoor
Awesome thanks guys, I'll run cipher. Also after i run cipher can i install an OS on that HD later on?

Yep, no problem at all.