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 > _______________________________________________ > dba-Tech mailing list > dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com