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securely erasing hard drive
Name: a_kraker99 Date: December 2, 2005 at 19:01:31 Pacific OS: XP Home CPU/Ram: p4 2.8ghz 1500 ram
Comment:
what is a good free program to wipe a hard drive completely?? I am selling my computer on Ebay and I dont want anyone to recover important Info
Name: XpUser Date: December 2, 2005 at 20:14:59 Pacific
Reply:
The only sure-fire way of ridding your HD of all traces of important info is by physically destroying the HD. Other than that, there is absolutely no guarantee that someone with the right knowledge and experience can't extract data.
i_XpUser
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Response Number 2
Name: vois2 Date: December 2, 2005 at 21:13:57 Pacific
Reply:
There are several free data 'shredders' available online. Most write the bytes with 0's and 1's randomly, and then do a second pass for more writing. Most use NSA-standard algorithms for securely erasing data.
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Response Number 3
Name: ham30 Date: December 2, 2005 at 21:35:05 Pacific
Reply:
Killdisk will clear it out. It writes zeros to the whole drive. That's plenty good enough. It would take someone with the capabilities of NSA or the FBI to get any info off it.
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Response Number 4
Name: dsolom3 Date: December 8, 2005 at 15:47:47 Pacific
Reply:
XpUser, what you are saying is nonsense. You can also unscrew the HDD and use a strong magnet, coming near the magnetic discs. Or there are easier, and no less reliable ways.
for free secure erazability - format your HDD, the reformat it again using a different file system (say FAT32), and then reformat back to ntfs.
Also give System Mechanic a shot - htey have a trial version, but includes a good shredder. Setting max protection settings will take a day though. In terms of actual time to secure the HDD.
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Please God Help!
