Wipe a HDD clean

GODuk

New member
Hi all,

I need to scrub a HDD. Does anyone know of a program and can it be fone while in Windows or does it need to be done using it as a second HDD?

Thx
 
You can format it in windows if it's not the one with windows on it. Just right click on the HDD in windows explorer and choose format and it will wipe it.
 
If you're wanting to void all traces of the pr0n you been looking at, DBAN (google is your friend) will do a thorough job.
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Not from within windows tho, this will be from boot.

Make sure it's the only disk attached to the pc - or you could lose the OS too.
 
There are also plenty of other heavy duty formatters using all sorts of crazy alghorythms on Hirens bootCD.

Pretty sure it also has Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) that Rast mentioned.
 
Its my mates. He's selling his laptop so wants to wipe all traces plus the os from the HDD.

Can this be done, its not like i can use the hdd as a seperate drive.

Scrub and re-formats...but how if i want to lose os to. Cheers
 
If it's the only drive in the laptop, stick the DBAN cd in the laptop, boot it, and it'll clear everything off it. Inlcuding the OS. It'll be a completely virginal disk.

I would mention tho, I've experienced DBAN not liking to be booted in a laptop - if this is the case, many laptops (HP's in particular) will have a "Disk Sanitizer" in the bios. This will do exactly the same job. Total erasure of evidence.
 
You need to use a program to do this, there is programs on Hirens boot CD that will do this, A quick look and it has "Active Kill Disk 4.1.2393 - Securely overwrites and destroys all data on physical drive." on it
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When you delete some thing on a HDD it still leaves a image on the HDD of it, it just is not visible to general user but there is programs out there that can recover this deleted file,

These programs that do make it so you can not recover the old data they simply write over the parts of the HDD where the files were stored then they delete the bogus files it created, this leaves an image of that bogus file and they can not dig up the original file, Apple has this built into their OS but windows dose not.
 
Have you tried the Active Kill Disk from Hiren recently ? Last time I tried it it was limited as to it's actions.

Things could be different in a newer HirenCD, but the reason the Active utilities were limited was in an attempt to keep HirenCD legal. i.e. a trial version that does 1 pass which is as-good as formatting.

Be interested if it's a fuller fat version now.
 
Yeah I belive it only the trial but this dose one pass and think it should be fine unless your some sort of secret service and selling your laptop to a hacker
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Lol, a normal windows format will be fine your average joe wouldn't know the first thing about recovering data.
 
You can still recovery data from a windows format pretty easy.

Just get DBAN and do a DoDShort 3pass even if someone wanted to recover data from that it would be very hard unless they got big bucks to spend to recover and even then it's very hard/pointless. The windows format has a bunch of software to recover files after a format.

Better to be safe then sorry and it only takes a few hours to DoDShort, so go watch a movie while it happens
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http://eraser.heidi.ie/

With this you can delete the files you don't want, then just clean up the "Unused disk space" - in layman's terms, all the stuff that could be picked up with a disk recovery tool. So all your old files should be okay, without having to do a fresh Windows install.

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