free hard drive eraser/wipe tool

hi guys,
if i was looking to use a free hard drive eraser/wipe tool, what do you guys use/recommend,

thanks for your time, bluesfloyd

 

Active KillDisk is a Powerful and compact piece of software that allows you to destroy all data on hard disks, USB drives and floppy disks completely, just think how handy this could be if you are selling or just moving on a computer to someone else.

Just download the program and after installation choose a platform to store the program to
these include, a cd drive, usb stick, or a floppy disk.

Once installed onto the other drive I.E. a usb stick you can then run the program on
any netbook, computer or laptop.

Here's a link,

http://www.killdisk.com/

 

Try the Softpedia DP wiper. Its free, fast and efficient. Here's the link: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Security/Security-Related/DP-WIPER.shtml

 

What do you want that software for? Do you want to wipe unnecessary files that gather up in the hard drive? Do you want to format your hard drive? Do you want to optimize it? Whichever the answers to these questions are, you have to understand what you want your software for. You can easily defragment your hard drive and optimize it for better performance without any random software downloaded from the internet.

 

Active KillDisk works, but I prefer using DBAN or Auslogics Security Cleaner if I have to just get rid of certain things but keep the file system in-tact without scrubbing the drive. There's other solutions that work great out there as well, but as long as they do at least a DoD Short or Guttenburg method, you're in good shape with it. Overwriting with pseudorandom data works too, but you have to make sure you have enough passes over the data for it to be effective. If you're looking at erasing the entire drive and all traces, there are some differences between how they work; some work well with the older IDE drives but not with SATA, while some designed to work with SATA that are slightly older may or may not have support for SSD drives which store data differently than the magnetic drives do.

ake sure the one you decide to use is able to work with your drive and controller properly if trying to do a block-write over the entire drive, file system, and any other part (master file table and other areas). As always, you should always use a file or data recovery tool to see if you can get your data back successfully or not. If you can't, then for the most part, the tool worked. If you can get the data back, then that means others can too, and you'll either want to try again, or use a different tool that is more complete.

 

hi,
if i had a old laptop running slow, and wish to reinstall windows 7 to it, would you wipe the drive first and then reinstall win7 for best results???? or only reinstall win7 to the old laptop,

thanks for your time, bluesfloyd,

 

Just reinstall windows 7

 

I am trying to revive my HP laptop and have given it to my nephew to take a look at it to see if he can do something. I just hate the thought that the laptop died at only two years old, and I will forward this thread to him to see if he needs a software to wipe out my data.

 

IcyBC


There are only a few occasions when you would require a hard drive wiping
program,these would be if you had purchased a used/second hand drive
from a stall,internet,or friend as it would still have recoverable media on it.

The other occasion would be if you were to sell your machine or pass it on.

For a non running machine or slow machine it's not necessary.

For a mob boss or double book keeper then it's a must.

 

Yes, then you'd need to make sure that if anyone touches your laptop without your permission and clicks on a single button, everything would self destruct and the system would get wiped out completely.

Generally, you can simply format the drive(s). Wiping means that you don't want data to be recovered at all.