Wiping Hard Drive

[Guille_Expat]

I'm going to sell my Inspiron notebook, and want to wipe the drive clean. I've heard that reformatting doesn't completely wipe the drive. Dell gives me two options, a fast and slow reformat.

So will the slow reformat completely wipe the drive? If not, are there some options that are free or inexpensive for this type of procedure.

Gracias :)

[Midknyte]

DBAN which is on UBCD.

Tech Tools (http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=173743)

[BipolarBill]

The Acronis True Image recovery CD has a very good wiping utility:

http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthread.php?t=199008

[Ol'Tunzafun]

Wiping the drive with either of these utililities is a good idea. I recently had occasion to do a data recovery for a client who owned a used laptop that had been formatted by the original owner. Not only did I recover all of the clients files but also hundreds of files belonging to the original owner.

[BipolarBill]

I just discovered that all Acronis boot environments are neutered. I was mixing up my full version CDs with the trial and missed this. I don't know if the data wiping utility will even work. Let us know if it does.

[Sterling_Aug]

DBAN is the best for one to 16 passes of wiping.

Three passes would be the best option.

[Ol'Tunzafun]

Acronis Disk Director boot CD will securely wipe unallocated space.

[Guille_Expat]

Hey thanks for info, I just got home. I'll looking into Acronis and see if that works and I'll let you guys know. What do you mean by passes? Does that mean, how many times it passes the hard drive? So if it does more passes, does that mean it's erasing more on the drive??

Anyway thanks!

[Midknyte]

Acronis isn't free; DBAN is.

Passes mean how many complete fills (either 0s or 1s) that the program will make over the entire drive.

[BipolarBill]

It takes hours to do by the way. The program literally writes zeros to every sector of the hard drive. It has to do that 8 or more times to qualify as a "government wipe".

[Guille_Expat]

Well I'm going to look into DBAN. I tried to download Acronis, but it wouldn't let me use a public email address. Crazy!

So I'm going to find DBAN and try that one. I'll keep you guys posted.

[Guille_Expat]

Okay, this is going to sound like a real stupid question to all you!

I found the DBAN website, since my Inspiron has no floppy drive on it. And the website as the option to download it on cdrom media. Cool but :eek:

How do I download to install on to a cdrom disk? Do I just save to a bland media disk and if I do. How would it run, do I just reboot with the cd in the drive. Or just click the drive letter to the dvd drive and just click "open". This is new to me :rolleyes:

Thanks :)

[Midknyte]

Like I said, you can download the UBCD iso and burn that. It has DBAN plus a bunch of other utilities. The link is in the tech tools like in my first post.

UBCD has instructions on their site for burning an ISO also.
http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/faq.html