Zero out a hard drive.

[techs]

I used to have a program that did a secure erase, ie write zeros to the hard drive. I can't find it. Does anyone know of a free program that I can run from a floppy to do this? I looked in the Windrivers utilities but Wipe and Zap are limited to size and the drive I have to clean is 40 gb.

[ephmynus]

Here are some LLF utilities that should do what you're looking for.

http://www.filelibrary.com/Contents/DOS/49/26.html

[techs]

Which one are you recommending? There are hundreds.

[ephmynus]

Most of the utilities that are labeled as low level format utilities should work without a hitch.

[NooNoo]

All the hard drive companies have their own downloadable diagnostics which include a zero filler. Some can be used on other drives as well.

[Ya_know]

Originally posted by techs
I used to have a program that did a secure erase, ie write zeros to the hard drive.

Are you looking for a very secure solution here? Because a simple zero fill is actually laughed at by most of the electronics forensics specialists. You can download any of the data recovery freebees and get some if not all of the data back.

I have heard of guys doing like 7 zero fills in a row, and that that is supposed to be unrecoverable, but I am not a specialist in this field, so I don’t know what it really takes…

I think there are some DoD guys that show up here every now and then, maybe they can tell you what they use to clean a drive securely…

[techs]

I am not a specialist at it either. I was under the impression that a low level format was different from a zero fill. From what I have read the government has some kind of standard that includes 3 passes of zero fill. I use to have a program that did this and was hoping someone had something like it. I guess I could just do a low level 3 times.

[edball]

This is the best one I've found.
http://www.vnunet.com/Download/1122953

[Chris_MacMahon]

when you purchase ghost you get a program called gdisk, it's their version of fdisk..........you can do a custom pass, a dod pass...(writes one's a zero's 7 times) whatever you want..

[edball]

Originally posted by Chris_MacMahon
when you purchase ghost you get a program called gdisk, it's their version of fdisk..........you can do a custom pass, a dod pass...(writes one's a zero's 7 times) whatever you want..

Thanks for the tip, I had that program and didn't know it.

[techs]

Good job Chris_MacMahon. There it is on my Ghost2002 in the Tools folder. Thanks

[melee5]

And then there's Bart's DiskTool that fits on a floppy, does drives over 8 gig and will test drives's all day along with a full erase (zero wipe) option.

Bart's Utilities page - DiskTool wiper
http://www.nu2.nu/utils/
http://www.nu2.nu/nu2files/diskto12.zip

[techs]

Follow up. Ran gdisk. Did the dod wipe. worked like a charm. where would i be without you guys?

[Chris_MacMahon]

i would venture to say that with out us you would not be here..

[ironwill99]

As an expert in the data recovery field. a simple one pass wipe will be sufficient for most peoples needs. Very few people have the ability to recover data that has been overwritten once let alone multiple times. the NSA might be able to do it but the odds of gating a full working file back are EXTREMLY small. i recomend PGP for file wiping and freespace wiping (www.pgp.com). check your drive with a hex editor after the wipe to make sure it worked.