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What's a good program for wiping freespace on hard drive?

uberman

uberman

Golden Member
I used to have programs for writing zeros to free space on the hard drive in Win98. I now have Windows XP. Can someone recommend a good utility?
Of course quality freeware is preffered; but, I'm not opposed to paying for it.
 
I don't really see a reason to zero a drive anymore unless you're concerned about people recovering your data. If you want to prevent data recovery try DBAN or Active@ Kill Disk. Your HDD mfg also offers free tools to zero the HDD.

Here is Seagate's

If you simply want to wipe the drive for an OS load use the disk management tool built-in to XP during setup.
 
Originally posted by: John
I don't really see a reason to zero a drive anymore unless you're concerned about people recovering your data. If you want to prevent data recovery try DBAN or Active@ Kill Disk. Your HDD mfg also offers free tools to zero the HDD.

Here is Seagate's

If you simply want to wipe the drive for an OS load use the disk management tool built-in to XP during setup.
Click to expand...

I'm concerned about credit card info., identity theft as computers are sold. I do also use proprietary zero writing programs before reinstalling windows. I've been doing it for some time and works well when hard drives have numerous partitions and partition management utilities. I've been looking at DBAN, it sounds good, but I don't think it writes to free space. It looks like it writes to entire drive.

 
I use ZTree for this function. In it, the process is called "Wash." ZTree is good old reliable XTree Gold refurb'd to work in XP. It is a hellaciously powerful tool. Note the 6th ferature down the list.

ZTree
 
corkyg


It looks as though ZTree does a lot. I'm just wondering what else I might do with this utility. Any ideas?
 
Yeah - it is really a powerful file management tool - the pruning and grafting functions don't exist anywhere else - also the ability to tag files and then do a gang change on them all. And, the hexadecimal editor has always been great.

As long as you are comfortable with a text based, DOS-like interface, it is sweet. Also - changing file attributes is simple and direct - remember RASH? 🙂

I mentioned it because I used it last week to "wipe/wash" 5 2.5" drives I am getting rid of. It did it through a Firewire linked external drive case.
 
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