Best Program Please,

[truehighroller]

I need as many oppinions on this one as possible please. I need to know what the best program to write zeros to my western digital sata drives would be please,,,,...... I have a bad boot sector and need to wipe both drives.

 

[Mando1351]

DBAN will be able to do that but complete the task but it will take hours...

 

[gwolfman]

There's BCWipe, which can do all zeros up to DoD 7-pass standards and such. There's another one I used before called WipeDrive. I don't know if any are free or if they have trials or not. If you still can't find one, search for and download Hiren's BootCD. You just boot to it from your CD drive and then it has some wiping tools I believe. Ultimate BootCD is another option that should have some wipe appz. Good luck.

 

[truehighroller]

The UBCD doesn't have to good of options from what I read on it's site supprisenly. I am going to try the estern didigital boot cd first as they said it will work with Vista and what not and it will write zeros for me. If not then I will start trying these other programs. I appreciate the input thank you.

 

[roadrunner197069]

Ultimate Boot CD does have 0 write tools on it.

 

[Zorg]

The UBCD doesn't have to good of options from what I read on it's site supprisenly. I am going to try the estern didigital boot cd first as they said it will work with Vista and what not and it will write zeros for me. If not then I will start trying these other programs. I appreciate the input thank you.

What? You may want to work on your reading comprehension. UBCD has Active@killdisk that will write zeros no problem. I have used it several times. It also has Memtest86+ etc.

 

[truehighroller]

I'm sorry I will try it if this doesn't work then I will go to get that. I actually didn't see that listed as a program that's weird.

 

[Zorg]

I'm sorry I will try it if this doesn't work then I will go to get that. I actually didn't see that listed as a program that's weird.

Well here it is along with 4 others.

 

[truehighroller]

Active@ Killdisk is good then I'm taking it?

 

[Zorg]

Yes.

 

[truehighroller]

I downloaded it. I am going to give it a go. I knew there had to be a good one out there some where. Thank you so much.

 

[Zorg]

If I was you I would zero write the whole drive, there is some stuff at the end. It will take a while, just let it cook.

 

[evongugg]

Writing zeroes does not prevent someone frome recovering the data off of it. Use one of the more advanced options, if you want to be safe.

 

[truehighroller]

Right , I just need to delete the boot table and format the drive to start all over because my boot table got corrupted that's all. I',m going to use the active@ Killdisk program.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

Writing zeroes does not prevent someone frome recovering the data off of it. Use one of the more advanced options, if you want to be safe.

To recover data off a HD that has had a zero write done to it, you need at minimum a clean room and some custom equipment to read the platters after disassembling them from the HD, or a scanning tunneling electron microscope.

You're correct, it's not impossible to recover the data. But if your adversary is going to that kind of effort to recover your data, I think you may have more problems than worrying about which drive wiper you used.

 

[truehighroller]

True that .

I just wanted to wipe out my boot sector and I thought about it and I know what caused this. I had, a new 780i board and had my array on it and yanked the array out and stuck it back onto my old GA-P35-DQ6 and that kind of pissed the two drives off a little. This writing zeros will wipe out the boot sector right? I noticed that it actually only shows 232 Gb out of the 250Gbs they are supposed to be a piece, according to western digital and I wanted to make sure that I'm not wasting my time here with this and it just doesn't touch the boot sector.

 

[Shadow703793]

I agree with the programs listed by Zorg

 

[truehighroller]

Its like"Killdisk" 80% done with the first drive and it has been 5 hrs . I read some where that you can actually wipe out the first 100 and something and actually get the boot sector issue resolved but, what ever this is probably best as I have had the one hard drive for awhile now and have done a lot of installs so,,. I actually answered my own question by digging deeper. It would be nice to only wipe out the beginning of the new drive and quit the program and that work though but, I don't know if that would be good enough or not.

 

[Zorg]

I have, in a pinch, run it for 5-10 minutes, which will clean it up. However, there is some data written at the end that you probably want to overwrite as well. I doubt it's a problem, but it's nice to wipe any trace and make it effectively a brand new drive.

 

[truehighroller]

True I noticed when glancing back through the notes that you had mentioned that. It is cooking the other drive right now while I'm at work. The other one finished sometime last night after I went to bed . I would hate to have a terabyte drive and have to do this geez. This took like 10-12hrs to write and confirm all together. I appreciate the help Zorg as always.

 

[truehighroller]

Guess what it was,,,,,,,, the damn drive that I bought was bad.... I still was having issues and decided to try the gigabyte raid controller instead of the intel one and it told me right away that the drive was bad. I took the drive back along with my rig to test it before I left the store and I put the new one in and it didn't complain about the new one. Grrrrrrrrrr,,, Thank you though everyone. I'm on her again right now woohoo.

 

[truehighroller]

Ok another update, my Silverstone Decatholon 750W power supply was zapping my drives.... I switched it out snd my problems stopped now I just wish I would have figured that out when I had my 780i because that was probably why I had so many isues with it overclocking. I noticed that when I upped my voltage to my cpu it zapped my hard drives.... on this one. It was showing lower voltages on my 780i for the cpu then what I was telling it to set them to and my other voltages were off a little to but, I though it was the voltage droop issue people talk about so much, but apparently it was the power supply the whole time.

 

[Zorg]

I'm glad you worked it out, very frustrating. I think PSU's eat more HDs then people give them credit for.

 

[truehighroller]

Yah the bad thing is I think that it f^<k3d my board up now to. I was deffinately having issues with it because what I thought was vdroop obviously wasn't now I am getting consistant voltage to my CPU again. I just checked it. My Intel Raid controller is whack now I think though. It detected my dvdburner for my install and for a little while then now it just stopped detecting it. I switched to the gigabyte controller and now it is being detected again . I am super mad @ silverstone for this one. That power supply was only month old if that.. I am going to have to rma the board asap. Whenever that will be.. Maybe I can talk gigbyte into sending me the replacement first . I might be dreaming there, I don't know about their RMA rules..

 

[Zorg]

How did you pin down that it was the Silverstone that was the culprit?