Software for purging my hard drive

[George in MO]

Can anyone recommend a good disk washer I might be able to download? I want to purge my hard drive before I give my old computer away.

[Cache]

Hi,

You hard drives manufacturer will have a boot disk to download on their website that should include a low-level format option. Note: dont be fooled by the word format, a low-level format is not like a standard FAT, FAT32, NTFS type format.

My fave though is Darik's Boot and Nuke (dban):
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

It has a whole range of wipe types including:
Quick Erase
Canadian RCMP TSSIT OPS-II Standard Wipe
American DoD 5220-22.M Standard Wipe
Gutmann Wipe
PRNG Stream Wipe

Each one of the wipe standards are configurable to use more that the standard passes, although if the person you are giving your hard drive away to is a mere mortal then a "Quick Erase" will easily do that job at 1 pass of zeros.

[George in MO]

I downloaded your dban suggestion, burned it to a CD and moved it over to the computer I wanted to purge. But I can't figure out how to execute the program. Nothing I've tried works. What am I missing here?

[Cache]

Originally Posted by George in MO

I downloaded your dban suggestion, burned it to a CD and moved it over to the computer I wanted to purge. But I can't figure out how to execute the program. Nothing I've tried works. What am I missing here?

I usually use the boot floppy so I can't tell you how to execute the CD version.

The boot floppy is simple enough to use. Just download the "Floppy version", pop a floppy into your floppy drive and run dban-1.0.6_i386.exe to make the boot disk. Then set your BIOS to boot from flopply first then restart with the boot disk in your floppy drive.

Once you have booted from the dban boot disk, press "Enter" or "Return" to start dban in interactive mode. On the next screen press "M" to enter the "Wipe Method" selection screen. At the "Wipe Method" screen, select the wipe type you want (I would just go for "Quick Erase"), then press "Space" to make your selection.

Now back at the main screen, use the up arrow key and move the cursor to the top-most selection, then press enter. After that just press "F10" to start the wipe.

Note: I've only used this on machines with one hard drive connected so the instructions above may only apply to single hard drive systems. If the hard drive you want to wipe is in a machine with multiple drives I suggest you disconnect any onther hard drives first.

[graham_ashe]

Originally Posted by George in MO

Can anyone recommend a good disk washer I might be able to download? I want to purge my hard drive before I give my old computer away.

There is actually a few lines of console code you can type to thoroughly wipe out your hard drive - even beyond recovery. Try doing a Google search and see if you can find it. I had it once, but lost it. Not sure if it will work for all hard drives, though. I used it some years back to solve a partitioning problem.