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Which Windows software to do secure wipe of hard drive?

I

iluvdeal

Golden Member
The utilities I'm aware of that do secure hard disk wipes, DBAN and Killdisk, require that you boot from their bootdisk and run the program. Can I do a secure wipe of a HDD from within Windows using some other software? If so, which one is recommended? Or is running a wipe utility outside of Windows the only secure way to do it? Thanks.
 
Heidi eraser can do whole partitions. Just make one fat32 partition covering the entire drive and wipe that. Not quite as thorough as dban (won't get mbr, partition table, etc) but it'll do the job for the overwhelming majority of cases.
 
Just found out that in Windows Vista/7 that right-clicking the drive letter, choosing format and unchecking the 'quick erase' seems to write zeros to the drive. Otherwise, you can use the Windows diskpart command line utility with 'clean all.' You can also use the drive manufacturer's utility for Windows (Western Digital has one) which does full tests and write zeros to the drive. I trust the drive manufacturer's software most, mainly to cover yourself for warranty that you didn't do anything out of the ordinary with 'unapproved' software.
 
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