Hello friends, I need to destroy the data on my HDD ASAP and do it in a way that I am FULLY ASSURED the data on the drive can't be accessed. Urgent responses most appreciated.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you do a low level format, I doubt that you could keep your existing partition table. But if you really want to, there is a free program to wipe your partition/whole harddrive clean. It will fill the drive with 0(zero fill) if you want. It's called Dban http://dban.sourceforge.net/ download the cd/dvd media iso then burn it to a cd/dvd and boot with it. Under method, choose the method to go by 1 pass only. select the partition to whipe, then wait an hour or 2. You might risk loosing everything on your harddrive, so backup everything and make sure you have a recovery dvd from the manufacture. -net
Thanks for the responses. What are the risks of someone still being able to access my data if I just reformat the drive via Windows XP?? I can't physically damage the drive as I am returning it to a vendor.
High Run a "wipe" program that writes a series of one's and zero's to the drive again and again. Really that is only necessary to protect against sophisticated data recovery (NSA, CIA, etc) If you are just trying to protect against joe-blow running a "format recovery" type program them just writing all zero's once to the whole drive should do the trick. Here is a free one I found by doing a quick google search, I'm sure there are others: http://www.heidi.ie/node/6
It depends on who you want to prevent recovering the data. The various overwriting methods are good, especially if you run the overwrite multiple times with close to random data. A reformatting is next to worthless. If you want to prevent a very sophisticated, determined group like the government from recovering the data then you should physically destroy the platters inside the drive. Jack