[dba-Tech] Wiping ALL data from a hard drive

chizotz at mchsi.com chizotz at mchsi.com
Wed May 25 12:34:36 CDT 2005


Jeff,

Well... I think that you can do easy and inexpensive, but not quick :)

There are many utilities available to do this, some free some not. FWIW I use 
Clean Disk Security http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/clndisk.html which is $25 
and is easy to use and has been reliable for me (at least as far as I know, it 
hasn't trashed any systems and as far as I can tell it works as advertised).

As I understand it, the US government specifies, or did at one time, that data 
must be overwritten 7 times to be irretrievable. Others say 35 times (Gutman) 
is what's really needed. I suppose it depends on how secure you want the disk 
to be. If the goal is simply to prevent a typical user who buys the disk from 
retrieving the data, I'd say that 1 pass is probably enough. A format doesn't 
really delete or overwrite anything, but overwriting the whole disk with a 1 
or 0 will prevent anyone without special tools from retrieving any data. But 
if you want to prevent someone with the special tools and the know-how from 
getting the data, you'll need to do at least 7 passes, maybe more.

And it will take a long time to run on each drive, hours or even days if the 
drive is large and you're doing 35 passes.

Good luck,

Ron



> I am looking for a quick, easy, inexpensive way to wipe ALL data from a hard 
> drive.  A local non-profit business has recently replaced their hardware and 
> wants to be sure that their data on the old machines is not retrievable by 
> anyone before they dispose of them.  I could format each hard drive, but I was 
> wondering if anyone here had a better idea.
>  
> TIA
>  
>  
> Jeff Barrows
> MCP, MCAD, MCSD
>  
> Outbak Technologies, LLC
> Racine, WI
> jeff at outbaktech.com
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