guys i am needing some help. i had mine two hard drives replaced with one big one. now i have two that are free and dont nneed them anymore. what could i do to wipe them freee because is saved a lot of porno on them before and now i want to sell them on ebay or something. any hints?
I asked the seedy looking guys on the corner, and they said to use the free utility at www.killdisk.com
Briggs Softworks makes a program called Directory Snoop allows you to completely wipe a drive (i.e. - write over all sectors with garbage data) so that the data cannot be recovered. It's pretty easy to use and works with both FAT32 and NTFS partitions. Just be sure to let it run overnight, as it's pretty slow.
When you sell them, advertise them as having lots of p*rn. If they dont want it, they can just delete it....at least be courteous enough to give them the option of watching some p*rn.
Normal formatting does not erase the disk. You have to do a low level format to totally erase it which requires a special utility in most cases.
To make your p*rn not readable in the hard drive, you need to overwrite it at least 5-7 times. People will still be able to get your p*rn with normal formatting
Usually the drive maker has a utility for low-level formatting. But does low-level even accomplish it? There are some free/almost free disk erase programs w/ algorithms approved by NSA/DOD that overwrite open sectors multiple times to totally erase ghost images.
This is the only answer. DBAN! Darik's Boot and Nuke. http://dban.sourceforge.net/ Basically, it wipes your hard drive by overwriting every sector on it a few dozen times. Bulletproof.
Sort of. A low level format writes zeros to all the sectors. Technically, you could read the ghost image but that requires special equipment and I think that would be overkill in this case. Generally, the most secure way to wipe a drive is by using a utility like DBAN, degaussing the drive with a large magnet, or by shredding it. The military actually have hard drive shredders.
Or download and fill your hard drive w/ reruns of Golden Girls. Then format it. At least if they start digging, all they'll find are a hilarious sitcom from the 80's starring 4 elderly women living in Miami.
Wow I wasn't aware that simply reformatting your hard drive does not erase your files. I'll keep that in mind next time because I've reformatted one of my old 80 GB hard drive before and gave it to my cousin (a computer nerd).. and.. oh my.. I hope he's not that nerdy. As far as Dookie Sandwich (gross moniker ) is concerned. If he reformats his hard drive and sells it and some nerd is able to obtain the old files.. shouldn't p*rn be the last of his worries? What about all those private files which could contain some serious personal information?
Before I finished reading the thread title, I was expecting, "How 2 wipe a hard dried dingle completely free" We've come a long way.
Well, realize that when someone says the files are "erased", that's not necessarily true. When a file is deleted, the sector(s) on the hard drive that contain the data are marked as available for new data writes. However, the actual data that resides within those sectors (that you thought you had deleted) remains and can be retrieved with the right software. The way to resolve this is to write data (random 1s and 0s) to the sectors that house "deleted" files, thus permanently eradicating the data. Some software even allows you to remove the file entry from the Master File Table, thus erasing any record that a file was even there. Theoretically, however, a truly determined person (read: FBI agent) can even find a file if the data has been overwritten only once. Thus, some software offers to overwrite multiple times. For example, the software I use offers a 35-pass overwrite that (and I quote): "overwrites the file with 35 passes per the paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" by security specialist Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. This technique combines numerous static and random byte patterns specifically designed to thwart hardware recovery techniques for a variety of disk drive controllers." But you should really only need this if you are doing something HIGHLY illegal on your system, or are EXTREMELY paranoid about your data. Even Gutmann acknowledges that two passes of random data are enough to make your data pretty much unrecoverable.
