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Thread: Need a quick way to wipe hard drive

  1. 03-09-2010, 10:22 AM #1
    BarryS
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    Question Need a quick way to wipe hard drive

    The company I work for has been sold leaving me to join the ranks of the unemployed. As part of the terms of the sale, the new company keeps the single PC in each retail location but not the data on it. I have to drive to each location (8 total) to perform the task of data removal. I can drive to each location and get back to the office within 5 hours if I did nothing once I got to each location. With that said, what would be the quickest way to wipe the hard drive clean?

    There's no sensitive company data on the PCs, so if someone wanted to play CSI and recover deleted files they would be worthless. However, I don't want to make it easy for someone to see those files either.

    If I were to reinstall XP making sure to delete the partition and reformat in the process, would this be good enough? I was thinking of doing a zero-fill, but I've read that its important to only use the ZF app from the hard drive's manufacturer. I'm also concerned that a ZF would take too long. Most of these PCs only have a 40GB drive, but some have 80GB.

    Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
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  2. 03-09-2010, 11:04 AM #2
    Train
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    Wipe and then a clean install.

    DBAN is what I use.
    http://www.dban.org/

    Tutorial for the DBAN boot cd
    http://www.simplehelp.net/2007/09/11...ur-hard-drive/
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  3. 03-09-2010, 11:51 AM #3
    BarryS
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    Cool. I'm going to give this a try. Any idea of a ballpark time that it would take to wipe a 40GB hard drive assuming it's only half full of data? The PCs all have 2GHz Intel processors with 512MB to 1GB of RAM.
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  4. 03-09-2010, 12:00 PM #4
    Train
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    Maybe a half hour. Can not say I really paid attention to the time factor.
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  5. 03-09-2010, 11:30 PM #5
    t34b4g5
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    why doesn't you company just purchase a few cheap 2nd hand drives and default install windows onto them.

    wouldn't worry about drivers etc leave that up to the new owners to do themselves.
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  6. 03-10-2010, 02:06 AM #6
    Ol'Tunzafun
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    There's no sensitive company data on the PCs, so if someone wanted to play CSI and recover deleted files they would be worthless. However, I don't want to make it easy for someone to see those files either.

    If I were to reinstall XP making sure to delete the partition and reformat in the process, would this be good enough?
    Yes, under those circumstances, that would be more than sufficient.
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