Wiping hard drives.

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waterpleb

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Oct 19, 2014
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Hi.
I need to wipe a few windows hard drives securely.

Is there a recommended software that will help me do this. Is it common practice to wipe the operating system aswell or is it safe to leave the operating system on the drive?

Thanks in advance.
 
Solution
M
Hi

Nowdays a single pass of dban is enough to destroy all data on a standard hard disk, internall sata, ide, scsi, sas or external usb

It can even wipe several disks at once

If you are willing to pay some money the people who wrote dban have a professional version which runs faster than the free version

One of my friends is paranoid and after using dban used a blowlamp on thedrive

Some organisations put the disk through a giant schredder

You cant easily leave windows behind and securely erase the disk

One way is to login to all user accounts run ccleaner then empty the recycle bin
Create a new admin account and remove all existing users and their files
Run disk clean up and remove restore points, windows.old etc

Then run...
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ComputerSecurityGuy

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Mar 30, 2015
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To qoute the Handbook of Applied Cryptography:
I wipe my drives and overwrite seven times. Once with ones, once with zeros, and five times with a secure psuedorandom algorithm. This might not even be enough. Physical destruction of drives is the only complete method to destroy data.
I'm probably misqouting. But that was around the idea.
Edit: Telemarketers? Really, autocomplete?
 
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mbarnes86

Splendid
Sep 16, 2010
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Hi

Nowdays a single pass of dban is enough to destroy all data on a standard hard disk, internall sata, ide, scsi, sas or external usb

It can even wipe several disks at once

If you are willing to pay some money the people who wrote dban have a professional version which runs faster than the free version

One of my friends is paranoid and after using dban used a blowlamp on thedrive

Some organisations put the disk through a giant schredder

You cant easily leave windows behind and securely erase the disk

One way is to login to all user accounts run ccleaner then empty the recycle bin
Create a new admin account and remove all existing users and their files
Run disk clean up and remove restore points, windows.old etc

Then run heidies eraser to clear all unused space on hard disk
With xp you can erase unused parts of clusters , this option does not seem to work with Vista or latter so some data could be recovered

Regards
Mike Barnes
 
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waterpleb

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Oct 19, 2014
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thanks for the detailed reply Mike. Thats handy to know as I have to wipe a handful of drives tomorrow. I assume theres no rush with them so I can try this method and see how I get on.
 
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waterpleb

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Oct 19, 2014
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Noted.
I'm not sure if the disks are destined for destruction , they might be being reused later on ,or not but I have to ensure they are wiped anyway,
 
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