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    Wiping my OS and HD.

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by me12345, Sep 18, 2008.

  1. me12345

    me12345 Notebook Evangelist

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    Hi, I'm selling an old laptop and I wish to securely wipe my HD. After doing some research, I decided to use Darik's Boot and Nuke, which seems to be good and is also free.

    From what I have read, generally one pass on the HD is not enough, but I can't seem to find much info on exactly how many passes needs to be done on the HD before the data is considered to be truly wiped and I can securely sell my laptop with a HD in it?

    Thank you for your help.

    P.S.

    I also have acronis drive cleaner if that is better than Darik's Boot and Nuke.
     
    me12345, Sep 18, 2008
    #1
  2. Andy

    Andy Notebook Prophet

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    You can also use Eraser and run a 3-pass on the folders you consider as confidential, etc.
    Then delete all the partitions using GParted.

    DBan will also work just fine.
     
    Andy, Sep 18, 2008
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  3. powerpack

    powerpack Notebook Prophet

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    Who are you trying to secure it from? Average user one pass would work. Protect from NSA/Homeland Security? Destruction of device.

    So three passes should be fine. There was a long thread on this in the past. No one other than some with high level security clearance knows what level of retrievable data remanence may remain.

    Real world you should be fine but be aware any software based wiping is potentially problematic if for example parts of the HDD are inaccessible. This can happen when sectors go bad they are hidden from the OS.

    One wipe will prevent any standard data recovery utility from retrieving (2006 NIST Special Publication 800-88 p. 7).
     
    powerpack, Sep 18, 2008
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  4. bcrab

    bcrab Notebook Enthusiast

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    KillDisk works good too and its free.
     
    bcrab, Sep 19, 2008
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  5. Pitabred

    Pitabred Linux geek con rat flail!

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    As long as you don't do a quick format, you should be fine. The only way to recover data that has been actually overwritten (as opposed to just marked as deleted) is to use some very special equipment to examine the hard drive platters outside of the hard drive itself.

    Unless you've annoyed the NSA, you're fine. Even the state or local cops would have a very hard time recovering anything.

    My preferred method: use a Linux bootable disk (I'm sure you've played with it sometime), open up a console and type this:

    Code: 
    dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=1M
    That overwrites everything on the first hard drive (generally all there is in a laptop) with random data. Should take about 15-30 minutes depending on how fast your drive is (the bs argument is very important in this... otherwise you're looking at hours), and you have a completely clean disk that needs to be repartitioned and formatted before it can be used.
     
    Pitabred, Sep 19, 2008
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