Wipe the drive [Archive]

1life2live4

07-26-2007, 07:28 AM

Hello all
I have a hard drive that Im going to give to someone to use but have years of files from work on the drive. The information could be very harmful to my company if ever retrieved. I have formatted the drive but would like to do what’s commonly called as a ( government wipe ) on the drive witch I think means after doing so no one can ever retrieve data from the drive. Dos anyone know of a good program that will do what im looking for.
Thanks ahead of time

Freakitchen

07-26-2007, 07:44 AM

The Ultimate Boot CD (www.ultimatebootcd.com) has tools on there that will 'zero fill' the drive, theoretically making data unrecoverable.

pam123

07-26-2007, 07:57 AM

There's also dban just for things like that : http://dban.sourceforge.net/

XenaWP

07-26-2007, 10:50 AM

Also active@kill disk.

1life2live4

07-26-2007, 12:37 PM

You guys rule . Thank you so much !!!!!
So wile were on the subject of wiping drives what program would you recommended I could use to recover lost data ,….
:)

XenaWP

07-26-2007, 12:56 PM

I was pretty pleased with File Scavenger when I dumbly formatted a hdd and installed Xp over my data .... Got back about 90% of my important stuff.

sgtspector

07-26-2007, 12:58 PM

First try PCInspector (http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm) It's free and works pretty good. If that doesn't work you might have to pony up a some coin and get a commercial package. I have used Stellar Fat and NTFS (http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm) with success and I am sure others have their own recommendations. HTH.

1life2live4

07-26-2007, 05:35 PM

Guys I love this program Active KillDisk but I have the free one and when Im wiping it says low securite one pass zeros , Dos that mean its not doing a good wipe and someone can still come and find things on the drive

Cricket

07-26-2007, 05:50 PM

You could run KillDisk several times or you could run DBAN (http://dban.sourceforge.net/) a few times after you run KillDisk. The more passes you make the harder it will be to recover data from the drive.

:) Cricket

pam123

07-26-2007, 07:07 PM

The more times a disk is overwritten the more (higher) the security level, according to government standards.
More here : http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Computer_Science/2007/completely_erase_harddrive.asp

As a practical consideration, unless the NSA is on your tail or you're donating the drive to the computer lab at MIT one or two passes should do it.