Can anyone suggest a good program to permanently delete data off of a hard
drive?

It was suggested to me that Active Kill Disk was good, however, I have read
mixed reviews and I'm not sure now.

In article <YsmdnaRk2cwG5qrfRVn-tg@rogers.com>, "Mike" <Undisclosed> wrote:

Sorry, you haven't adequately described your problem. Are you
scrubbing the drive for your own reuse, for resale, or what?

However, in any case, if your security needs are more than
trivial then do NOT erase the disk; DESTROY it instead.

New HDs cost less than a buck a gigabyte these days; destroy the
old one and buy another. Anything else is foolishness (a waste
of time to save only a little money with a significant residual
risk of compromise).

Regards,

PS I know you won't do this (i.e. buy a new HD) but it still
is superb advice (even if I do say so myself :-)

In article <YsmdnaRk2cwG5qrfRVn-tg@rogers.com>, Mike wrote:

Who are you trying to prevent reading the data? If concerned that
Mommy is going to find those nasty sites, just about anything will do.
Is Mommy a scientest with access to a Class 1 clean room? You got a
bigger problem there. Or are you worried about industrial espionage,
or even national secrets? (In the latter case, see the Contracting
Officer, who will have very explicit instructions.)

Is your access to google broken too? Here, let me help:

secure 'hard disk' delete________________ Search Advanced Search
Preferences
Web Results 1 - 10 of about 1,380,000 for secure 'hard disk' delete.
(0.41 seconds)

secure 'hard disk' delete FAQ____________ Search Advanced Search
Preferences
Web Results 1 - 10 of about 245,000 for secure 'hard disk' delete FAQ.
(0.24 seconds)

The classic paper is Peter Gutmann's paper from 1996, which you can find at
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut00...ecure_del.html

What you have to determine is how hard do you want to make it to recover
the data. Make it impossible? Easy - remove the platters, melt them down
to a puddle. Can't access a furness? Remove the platters, and use a belt
sander with a fine silicon carbide abrasive to sand off the magnetic coating.

Are you looking for a "software solution"? If you are talking impossible to
recover, then there is no such software. Read the Gutmann paper to find out
why. Just want to make it damn difficult? Any software that bypasses the
disk controller, and writes directly to the media will probably do. You do
need to write to a diskspace many times larger than any software or hardware
caching (or disable those caches) so that the data actually gets overwritten.
Repeat that several times. This may still not get everything, because the
average modern drive has 'self repair' sectors that will silently be used to
replace dodgey one - BUT the data will never be removed from replaced sectors.

'hard disk' 'data recovery'______________ Search Advanced Search
Preferences
Web Results 1 - 10 of about 3,260,000 for 'hard disk' 'data recovery'.
(0.16 seconds)

Notice that google finds more hits for hard disk data recovery, than for
secure deletion. Just a hint.

Old guy

I will be either selling or donating my old computer and that's why I'm
looking for a solution to removing data.
I have been tracking for instance my credit cards (numbers, expiry dates
etc.) I don't really want to donate this information along with the
computer.

<nemo outis@erewhon.com (nemo outis)> wrote in message
news:mQ3_d.699854$Xk.67691@pd7tw3no...

nemo outis wrote:
will probably crash in 6 months anyway. Causing more work than a new
drive of the same capacity would cost. On my personal boxes I usually
replace them every 3-4 years. With the way capacities are growing, and
getting faster, it really doesn't make much sense to get the last byte
out of it. I still have a number of old 10GB drives that are hardly
used. Good for a Unix cache drive but hardly worth the effort. Of
course I typically migrate the mobo to something else in that time frame
too, as one usually wants the next AMD 64 or some such.

Usually some family member gets the mobo box and drive as an upgrade,
but for mom, she gets a new drive!

If you really want to ensure the data is gone from NSA or FBI grind that
puppy to dust or use a cutting torch and cut those platters to itty
bitty pieces. (heat releases the molecular alignment making readability
even of the pieces questionable. Makes a pretty flame, best done while
drinking a few good German beers, with friends. If you grind the disk
before putting torch to it the metal actually catches fire when you put
the cutting torch to the dust. Might want to ensure you are not inside.
It really takes some time to destroy the data properly ;-) But it does
make a fine excuse for a party.

Question: Does anyone know if this creates toxic fumes? I am still
here but just curious....

Winged

winged <winged@nofollow.com> wrote:
I'm curious about the process here. Specifically, why German beers? Would
a good Scottish ale work as well?

I've seen suggestions of phosphorus, cobalt, and ruthenium used in the
coating process. Take a cutting torch to this, and you're going to end
up with heavy metal oxide vapours floating around. It's probably fairly
small amounts, but I'd definitely avoid breathing the fumes in as much
as possible.

In article <wYGdnb7-ZKvreaXfRVn-uA@rogers.com>, "Mike"
<Undisclosed> wrote:

If you are determined to take the risk, then here's what I
recommend. It's tedious and still less than ideal but will
thwart almost all amateurs and many pros.

1. Do a **low-level** erase with the **HD manufacturer's**
program including any bad or remapped sectors (e.g., the latest
version of WDDIAG or Lifeguard tools for Western Digital drives,
MAXLLF or LLFUTIL for Maxtor, etc.) and do a full erase &
low-level format on the drive, including restoring all "bad"
sectors if you can (in order to erase them).

2. Erase the disk with a good multi-pass eraser (I like
BCWipe but Tolvanen's Eraser or something similar would also do).
I suggest not fewer than 7 overwrite passes; more is better, but
life is short :-)

3. **Essential!** Attempt data recovery with one or more
tools as a QA check of your erasing! (File Scavenger is the best
for - former - NTFS volumes; a number of programs will do for
various flavours of FAT). If you can recover *anything* consider
abandoning the erasing policy and revert to my (recommended)
destruction policy.

Regards,

PS Paranoids will go for even more elaborate schemes, such
as (in terms of the above steps): 2 - 3 - 1 - 3

PPS It may be necessary to reformat the drive (high-level)
beween steps 1 & 2 for your multipass eraser of choice to work
(some require this, some don't).

Alas, my education is lacking, I have had many a fine ale, but never a
Scottish one. If Scottish ale has similar field properties that other
ales, meads, largers, malts, and stouts have the end result should be
pleasant.

Thanks about the heavy metal warnings. I avoid breathing vapors when
becoming retentive about destruction. Usually I am just looking for an
excuse to party ;-)

winged wrote:
Nor has anyone else

I use Eraser, always work, no problem, you can make it eras according
to you one pattern. it,s a freeware, but its so good that you should
donate a dollar.

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

--
Robsten
http://w1.853.comhem.se/~u85329080/
http://web.comhem.se/~u85329080/indexB.htm
http://robsten.blogspot.com/

Ohh with Eraser you can erase unused space, you erase a whole partiton.

--
Robsten
http://w1.853.comhem.se/~u85329080/
http://web.comhem.se/~u85329080/indexB.htm
http://robsten.blogspot.com/

In article <mn.a4907d53ee7a1d2b.27902@min.com>, go.to.my@site.se wrote:
Besides the HD manufacturer's low-level "zeroing" (not truly a
low-level format - that can only be done at the factory) there
are some specialized full-drive rezero-ers, including KillDisk
2.0 and Spinrite 6.0 (that's not all Spinrite does). But BCWipe
or Eraser and a number of others work fine as well.

But whatever you use be sure to attempt file recovery afterwards
as a QA check. This will ensure, for instance, that the HD
buffer (as big as 16 meg for Maxtor) didn't "isolate" your
writes, etc.

Regards,

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 18:41:08 -0600, Moe Trin wrote:

That was a good read, but I've still got to wonder about it. I mean,
like, I had a dozen or so "compromising" pics taken and put them in a
folder on a computer running WinXP. After a couple of days I used Eraser
to do a Gutman 35 pass overwrite, then I purged the files with Directory
Snoop, defragged and erased the unused disk space with 1 pass of
Pseudorandom Data. That was a month ago. The computer in question,
meanwhile, gets a significant amount of use reading and writing data to
the disk with several erasures of other more mundane files and folders and
several more unused disk space erasures. My significant other works for
the FBI, however, and is suspicious. What are the chances of his finding
those pictures? As time goes by it seems to me that finding an individual
picture or file of any sort would be darn near impossible even for the
FBI,or is it just a matter of how much time and money someone wants to
spend to find something they "think" might be there?

Författare Candi Simms 2005-03-24 :
NONE!!!

--
Robsten
http://w1.853.comhem.se/~u85329080/
http://web.comhem.se/~u85329080/indexB.htm
http://robsten.blogspot.com/

On Fri, 25 Mar 2005 03:52:42 +0000, Robsten wrote:



I'm sorry, what does that mean?

Författare Candi Simms 2005-03-25 :
The chance for anyone to find a picture is zero!!

--
Robsten
http://w1.853.comhem.se/~u85329080/
http://web.comhem.se/~u85329080/indexB.htm
http://robsten.blogspot.com/