Performing the Secure Erase function on HDD

[Caimbeul]

Hi,

I'm hoping this is the correct forum category - basically I am selling off a load of my old HDD drives and and wanted to securely erase them using the secure erase function built in to the HDD.

I have found this freeware program http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml at the center for megnetic recoring research which if you read the readme and about files should do a good job. Now this has to be run from a boot disk/dos. I have tried making a disc using the link in the CMRR website to create bootable disc but cant seem to get anywhere with it getting some error message and would eventually end up with an a: prompt (i dont have a floppy drive installed) and i could not change to another drive. I tried the same disc again with hdderase.exe on the disk but whenever i try and run it it tells me than it is an invalid command path.

Trued this "ultimate boot cd" (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/) the beta version of which has the latest version (4.0) of HDDerase on it and this successfully boots and i can scroll through the list of tools to find hdderase but i simply cant seem to get it working. I know so little about dos apart from commands like cd, dir exit etc.

Would anyone be able to have a look at this app and tell me step by step what i need to do to get this app working? I aknow this is quite a steep request but would greatly appreciate someone helping me out with this as the app is not supported.

Thanking everyone in advance for any help.

 

[sub mesa]

Not sure if that would make data recovery impossible. Why not just do a zero-write or write random junk?

 

[Caimbeul]

According to the authors it would make it virtually impossible unless the platters were removed and place on a spin stand in a lab, even then it would be tricky.

Any ideas on how to run this?

Or it may just be easier if someone could inform me how to creates a bootable CD and add this file to it. I appreciate that there are many many tutorials on the web to make a bootable cd but i am uncertain as to how i would add the hdderase application and i dont know my way around dos to save my life so any and all help is appreciated.

 

[sub mesa]

If you are concerned about recovery; zero-write and random-write your drive; this can be done with any of the million utilities, from within Windows with the open source app 'Eraser' or with any Linux livecd using the terminal.

A HPA erase does not make file recovery impossible; you would need to physically overwrite the sectors that store the data; that would make data recovery impossible.