Need to securely erase hard drive to return to seller - use DBAN?

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maximum-cache

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One of my hard drives is failing (but still working) and as it's under warranty I need to return it to the seller (who has already been good enough to send me a replacement).

Would DBAN privide a sufficiently secure erase, or should I be looking elsewhere? I don't really want to spend any money as this is hopefully a one off. A secure erase is of course essential as there is some personal private data on the faulty drive.
 
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ajpaolello


You should be good then with the way suggested. Like I said, lots of expensive equipment for information must won't care about.
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Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

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Hey there, maximum-cache.

Well you could go with that or you can do a simple low-level format (a.k.a. Write Zeros) via CMD (Diskpart). However, for a complete wipe, this would go through each individual sector of your drive and at this point it really matters what's the HDD's condition. What I mean is that if it is physically damaged it might not be able complete the whole process. That's why if you go with Diskpart, I'd advise you to go with the "clean" command first (it should take no longer than a few minute) and if that's successful (which would still make it pretty hard or impossible to recover the data), you could go with the "clean all" command which will basically wipe out each sector one by one (it could take hours depending on the drive's capacity). And at this point if the process fails, I'd say you'd be pretty safe anyway.

Here's how to do that:
1. Open CMD (Command Prompt) as administrator
2. Type diskpart and press "enter"
3. Type list disk and press "enter"
4. Type select disk X and press "enter" (where X is the number of the disk you wish to wipe, so don't forget to change it with the appropriate one - e.g. if the disk is disk 2, you should type "select disk 2")
5. Type clean and press "enter" and wait for the process to finish.

The second time, repeat the process but in step 5 instead of clean, type clean all.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD
 
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M

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Thanks very much. The disk is working just fine but recently it's been making some unusual noises which is why I'm replacing it.

I'll try diskpart and clean then.

It's a 1TB drive so presumably the process is going to take a fair few hours?
 
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Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

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"Clean" won't take long at all. When the process is completed you will see a message along the lines of "Diskpart succeeded in cleaning the disk" or something similar. As for "clean all", if the drive is 1TB it shouldn't take too long as well, probably a couple of hours if there are no complications due to physical faults. Anyway it would be best if you wait until you see the aforementioned message. This would mean that the process has been completed.
Just FYI, if you decide to check out the drive in Disk Management after "clean" or "clean all" it will be unpartitioned and not initialized as if it was a brand new internal HDD.

Cheers!
 
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Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

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Jul 31, 2014
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Well you know how people say, nothing is impossible. :D
However all joking aside, I wouldn't imagine that anyone would even try. Even data recovery companies most likely won't have any luck with a drive that has gone through a full wipe via a low level format. Your data will be gone for good (at least from that drive).
 
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Samer1970

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If you have top secret sensitive data , just destroy it ... They can recover the DATA even if you write zeros on it ...

But if it is just sensitive personal data dont worry about it no one would waste money on recovering that .
 
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ajpaolello

ajpaolello

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You should be good then with the way suggested. Like I said, lots of expensive equipment for information must won't care about.
 
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