Hatrack River Forum: Does anyone know of a free utility for wiping drives?

This is topic Does anyone know of a free utility for wiping drives? in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.

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Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :

We're donating an old computer, and want to make sure information isn't recoverable like it is w/ fdisk.

It's Win 98, if that matters.

Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :

Try Windex, my screen is ALWAYS clean using it... [Big Grin]

Posted by Sid Meier (Member # 6965) on :

partition magic/manager?

Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :

Ooh, I found this. It makes a boot disk with a Linux kernel. Boot the disk, and you can wipe all drives.

Seems to work great.

Kwea: [Big Grin]

Sid, partition managers by default don't prevent the data from being readable. There are recovery tools that can get at some of the data.

Some partition managers have that feature, but I don't have any of them.

Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :

If time is not an issue, Dag, you can use this:
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0%2Cfid%2C22920%2C00.asp

It'll write zeroes to every sector on your drive once. (The pay version writes three times, and is thus DoD-compliant.) But it's slow.

I hear this one's a bit faster:
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :

Dban's the one I found. It ain't a speed demon either (it's 1/3 of the way through the second pass), but it's doing it without me

Once would have been enough - I'm not expecting someone to try to read the magnetic encoding directly. I've just read enough articles about people buying uses computers which have only been fdisked that I wanted an actual erasure.

Thanks. I'll make a note of both of them for the future.