websey 0 Report post Posted December 11, 2008 Hi Guys,Well the other day a friend of mine rang me up and asked me if formatting his HDD would destroy all his data on it as he is giving it away to a family member.....I was pretty blunt and told him if he formatted his HDD then brought it around to me I could get almost all his data back for him pretty easily !!!He then asked me what I would do ? Well as he was giving it away to another family member for xmas along with his laptop etc I told him the easiest thing to do as to Zero Fill the HDD as this would at least corrupt most the data and during the time the family member had the laptop he would pretty much erase alot of data through there own actions....Anyway to the point of the topic...What programs if any do you use to zero fill / nuke your HDDI have found one little program that is free weighs in at only 2mb and you can either get it in an iso or exe package (make bootdisk)Below is a couple of quote from there website DBAN was reviewed by the RCMP and it met their minimum standard for use by Canadian government agencies. The report summary is published here:http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ We are working on a release that will fully conform to the B2-001 specification. DBAN qualifies as a domestic product because it is supported by a company with incorporations in most Canadian provinces. Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot disk that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction. DBAN is a means of ensuring due diligence in computer recycling, a way of preventing identity theft if you want to sell a computer, and a good way to totally clean a Microsoft Windows installation of viruses and spyware. DBAN prevents or thoroughly hinders all known techniques of hard disk forensic analysis. The development and support of the DBAN software project is funded in part by GEEP International. GEEP is the largest, the most efficient, and the most environmentally conscientious consumer electronics recycling company in North America. Well anyway as you would expect I ran the program and it was pretty good, for a freeware program it was nice and simple pretty much tells you what you need to do on the website, it also gives you different levels of service to run from a quick nuke upto what the DoD and FBI use the service for to wipe there old refurbished computers.The only problem is the time it takes now dont get me wrong I am not new to computers but it did take 4 1/2 hours to complete.....I suppose though for some people that is an alright time to wait if you wwant security that it will be almost impossible for people to get your old data...Anyway hope you have found this informative and the link for the program is belowhttp://www.dban.org/websey*** Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
rvalkass 5 Report post Posted December 11, 2008 I do the following to nuke a HDD: WARNING: The following command will wipe all data, unrecoverably, from your hard disk drive! CONSOLE me@my-laptop:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=<hard disk device> Overwrites the whole drive with nothing. So far, not a single data recovery company has been able to recover a drive that has been put through that. There is even a competition to see if anyone will be able to do it. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
