What do you use to write zeros to a drive?

[antyler]

I have acronis true image, and i have only used it to clone a drive.

Will it let me completely erase a drive and write zeros to it?

Im upgrading the drive in my desktop, and am going to give the current drive to a family member, I just want to be sure none of my old stuff is on there, and that I couldnt ever be compromised in the future.

what do you use?

thanks,

tyler

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

dban.

 

[antyler]

Originally posted by: Fullmetal Chocobo
dban.

ill look it up.

 

[MDE]

DBAN Linked.

 

[Jeff7181]

DBAN works well, but it doesn't just write zeros... it uses methods that meet military standards for erasing data. If you don't have anything that important on your drive, you might want to try one of the other tools on the Ultimate Boot CD. I recently used DBAN on a 80 GB laptop hard drive and it took about 40 hours to do the default three pass wipe.

 

[antyler]

Ah, i downloaded dban and was gonna use it, but after what you say Jeff, i may want to go another right. I dont have anything extremely important, but I just wanted something a little more secure than the common reformat. .

 

[starfireone]

I use Windows Washer by Webroot. It is not free but it sure works great for me.

 

[St0ry]

Acronis TrueImage come with Drive Cleanser that can be used to wipe disks. You can choose from different standards of wipes or create your own.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: antyler
I have acronis true image, and i have only used it to clone a drive.

Will it let me completely erase a drive and write zeros to it?

Im upgrading the drive in my desktop, and am going to give the current drive to a family member, I just want to be sure none of my old stuff is on there, and that I couldnt ever be compromised in the future.

what do you use?

thanks,

tyler

You really only need a program that will write a zero to each sector.
Going through the , write 20 time to each sector, format, then write 20 times again is pointless for the average user.
Once the sector value is changed then that is the value that the drive will return every time it reads that sector. There is no need to write the sector over and over.
All of these data recovery programs neglect to tell you that they can only recover data that has not been overwritten.

The reason the military has high standards for erasing each sector is not because they are worried about someone running a software program and recovering the data. It is because they are worried about someone removing the platters and reading the data in a lab.

So write a zero to each sector and your good to go.
If its a seagate drive then download seatools from the seagate site, it will write a zero to each sector. I suppose other drive makers have something similar.

 

[mooseracing]

.308 and a few tracer rounds. HD's make good target testing at about 300 yds out.

 

[antyler]

Originally posted by: Modelworks

Originally posted by: antyler
I have acronis true image, and i have only used it to clone a drive.

Will it let me completely erase a drive and write zeros to it?

Im upgrading the drive in my desktop, and am going to give the current drive to a family member, I just want to be sure none of my old stuff is on there, and that I couldnt ever be compromised in the future.

what do you use?

thanks,

tyler

You really only need a program that will write a zero to each sector.
Going through the , write 20 time to each sector, format, then write 20 times again is pointless for the average user.
Once the sector value is changed then that is the value that the drive will return every time it reads that sector. There is no need to write the sector over and over.
All of these data recovery programs neglect to tell you that they can only recover data that has not been overwritten.

The reason the military has high standards for erasing each sector is not because they are worried about someone running a software program and recovering the data. It is because they are worried about someone removing the platters and reading the data in a lab.

So write a zero to each sector and your good to go.
If its a seagate drive then download seatools from the seagate site, it will write a zero to each sector. I suppose other drive makers have something similar.

So basically your saying, by using the Western Digital formatting tool, no one will be able to recover data from the formatted drive with a software program?

 

[antyler]

Originally posted by: St0ry
Acronis TrueImage come with Drive Cleanser that can be used to wipe disks. You can choose from different standards of wipes or create your own.

What version of TrueImage has the drive cleanser? I cannot locate it in my version 10.

 

[The Odorous One]

dBAN is a great way to kill data. Quick Erase will write 0's to the hard drive in one pass. Takes about 40 minutes on my Core Duo (1.8 GHz) laptop with 60GB 7200 rpm drive. A 16 pass PRNG execution takes about 8 hours (8 passes of this is highly secure). It really depends on the hard drive controller being used.

 

[antyler]

Originally posted by: The Odorous One
dBAN is a great way to kill data. Quick Erase will write 0's to the hard drive in one pass. Takes about 40 minutes on my Core Duo (1.8 GHz) laptop with 60GB 7200 rpm drive. A 16 pass PRNG execution takes about 8 hours (8 passes of this is highly secure). It really depends on the hard drive controller being used.

40 minutes isnt outrageous. Certainly doable. I just made the ultimate boot cd too tho, so I have a backup plan if dban doesnt work out.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: antyler

Originally posted by: Modelworks

So write a zero to each sector and your good to go.
If its a seagate drive then download seatools from the seagate site, it will write a zero to each sector. I suppose other drive makers have something similar.

So basically your saying, by using the Western Digital formatting tool, no one will be able to recover data from the formatted drive with a software program?

If their utility writes a zero to each sector then you can use it.

Where a lot of the confusion comes in is in the format command.

If you quick format a drive it only erases the index of where each file was located, so the actual data is still there, its just the drive has no idea where its located. So you could run a program to scan and recover the data.

If you choose the regular format option without quick format, it still only erases the index, but this time it reads each sector to make sure it can be read, but again it writes nothing over the data , so that data is still there.

So write a 0 or 1 to each sector one time and your fine.
A hard drive would be useless if after you wrote a zero to a sector it could read anything else when it was asked what value that sector contained.

So as long as you write a zero once to each sector your fine.
Unless you expect someone to remove the platters and place them under a electron microscope

 

[Scottae]

killdisk is DOS based and has worked well for me... and free

 

[Gillbot]

dban myself

 

[capeconsultant]

I like Wipe Disk 5.0 myself.

 

[antyler]

I ended up using a disk eraser program off of the ultimate boot cd. It worked well. Said it was specifically designed to permanently erase data in a way that cannot be recovered. It wrote zeros over the whole drive.