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I have a person who is donating their old PC. She wants me to format her drive and do a fresh Windows install with the original configuration before she donates it. All well and good. But, she is paranoid about making absolutley sure that all her data is off of there. Paranoid with a good reason, as she has been a victim of identity theft in the past. So anyway, I read in a PC magazine somewhere that you should format the HD several times to make sure of any stray bits of data that might be reconstituted by a hacker. How many formats is "several?" 3? 5? 20? Has anyone else ever had to do something like this? Any advice would be appreciated.

You know I have seen programs that you can boot into that will write a 0 to every sector of a harddrive. That will surely wipe everything.

You could do something close to that yourself. Format the harddrive, make one large partition, then have a dos boot disk with a little programming that just writes to a file until it fills your harddrive. Then reformat. Program would be pretty easy to write i should think.

Not very quick and that might not be the best answer however, but I would think it should work fine.

tfp

Just formatting isn't nearly as effective as writing random data over the top of things several times. Formatting is too predictable in what it does, writing random data isn't. There are programs available to do this, but I don't have any experience with any of them.

Google "DBAN". If it's a good sized drive it will probably take overnight (or longer) to run but afterwards it should be next to impossible to recover any data from it.

Yep formatting and reformatting are no where near guaranteed to render all data unrecoverable but none would be likely to be easily recovered by anyone other than an advanced user. The best method is to use sw specificly designed to wipe out the entire HD bit for bit, not only is each bit set back to zero but also toggled back and forth and can be left in a random state afterwards. This is VERY secure indeed but there is no 100% perfect method other than totally physically destroying the HD and then buying a new one to replace it (or possibly a 2nd hand one).

If you want to do it manually you could copy data from another HD (or CD/DVD if necessary) into different directories on the HD until it's full. Then destroy the partitions, set new ones and reformat (the slow way). Then you could repeat as you feel necessary. This would work pretty well too but would tie up more time. If you want to be certain you may find a company out there who specialise in recovery, if they test it for free (in order to say we can get xx files for $xx) and that way you'd know for sure. You'd have to be very paranoid to do so though.

I would recommend using a zero write utility.

I use a program called AutoClave at work. You can find it here
http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/

I knew I had catalogued a bunch of wipe programs a little while back, here they are ...

Active@ Kill Disk - http://www.lsoft.net/
AnalogX SuperShredder - http://www.analogx.com/welcome.htm
CHAOS Shredder - http://www.safechaos.com/
CuteShield File Shredder - http://www.sys-shield.com/
Darik's Boot and Nuke SE - http://dban.sourceforge.net/
DataDestroyer - http://tomorroware.blix.com/
East-Tec File Shredder - http://www.east-tec.com/
Eraser - http://www.heidi.ie/
NecroFile - http://www.necrocosm.com/ (can just clean unused HD space)
PC Inspector e-maxx - http://www.pcinspector.de/emaxx/uk/welcome.htm
Scrub - http://mywebpages.comcast.net/darbak
Sure Delete - http://www.wizard-industries.com/
UltraWipe - by RedStrike

Gotta be something there that will do the trick!

Austin wrote:

:lol: I knew I had catalogued a bunch of wipe programs a little while back, here they are ...

Active@ Kill Disk - http://www.lsoft.net/
AnalogX SuperShredder - http://www.analogx.com/welcome.htm
CHAOS Shredder - http://www.safechaos.com/
CuteShield File Shredder - http://www.sys-shield.com/
Darik's Boot and Nuke SE - http://dban.sourceforge.net/
DataDestroyer - http://tomorroware.blix.com/
East-Tec File Shredder - http://www.east-tec.com/
Eraser - http://www.heidi.ie/
NecroFile - http://www.necrocosm.com/ (can just clean unused HD space)
PC Inspector e-maxx - http://www.pcinspector.de/emaxx/uk/welcome.htm
Scrub - http://mywebpages.comcast.net/darbak
Sure Delete - http://www.wizard-industries.com/
UltraWipe - by RedStrike

Gotta be something there that will do the trick!

Wow. I see your reputation as the advicemeister is well earned!

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Darik's Boot and Nuke

If you have a floppy drive, download the floppy version. If not, download the CD version instead; you'll need to burn the disk image (in ISO format) to a CD. Make sure to note the important version information:

--> Boot from the floppy or CD
--> Press ENTER to go into interactive mode
--> Press the space bar to select the entire drive, or just a specific partition
--> Press "R" to select rounds, and enter "7" (that's the official Dept. of Defense standard)
--> Press "F12" and kiss your data goodbye

*Source: Maximum PC April 2004 - page 33

dban sounds tasty. I'm taking notes.