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I have 2 2TB External HD's I want to sell. How should I securely erase them?

minimalist
By minimalist
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Preferably 25 pass.  With OS X it was easy but I'm not sure how to do it on Windows 8

Case: NZXT H500i. Motherboard: Asus Prime Z390-A. CPU: i7 9700k OC @ 5.0GHz. GPU: EVGA 2080 FTW3 CPU Cooler: NZXT X62. Memory: G. Skill Ripjaws 32Gb 3200mhz. Storage: 1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD /  120GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD  /  WD Caviar Black 3TB / WD Caviar Green 4TB. . PSU: Corsair AX760. Monitor: 2x Acer XB270HU. Keyboard: Corsair K70 RGB. Mouse: Corsair Glaive. 

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why would you want to sell them???

 

storage is king

 

I have a 4TB WD Green, a 3TB WD Black, a 1TB SSD, and a 120GB SSD in my new PC.  I have plenty of storage.  

Case: NZXT H500i. Motherboard: Asus Prime Z390-A. CPU: i7 9700k OC @ 5.0GHz. GPU: EVGA 2080 FTW3 CPU Cooler: NZXT X62. Memory: G. Skill Ripjaws 32Gb 3200mhz. Storage: 1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD /  120GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD  /  WD Caviar Black 3TB / WD Caviar Green 4TB. . PSU: Corsair AX760. Monitor: 2x Acer XB270HU. Keyboard: Corsair K70 RGB. Mouse: Corsair Glaive. 

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You don't need 28 passes on modern drives, 1 is enough or if you really want to you can do 2. For both cases I recommend DBAN (http://www.dban.org).

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overwriting everything with 0

do 3 passes just to be sure, that will be enough

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I'm kind of shocked Windows doesn't have something like this built into it.

Case: NZXT H500i. Motherboard: Asus Prime Z390-A. CPU: i7 9700k OC @ 5.0GHz. GPU: EVGA 2080 FTW3 CPU Cooler: NZXT X62. Memory: G. Skill Ripjaws 32Gb 3200mhz. Storage: 1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD /  120GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD  /  WD Caviar Black 3TB / WD Caviar Green 4TB. . PSU: Corsair AX760. Monitor: 2x Acer XB270HU. Keyboard: Corsair K70 RGB. Mouse: Corsair Glaive. 

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You don't need 28 passes on modern drives, 1 is enough or if you really want to you can do 2. For both cases I recommend DBAN (http://www.dban.org).

 

What exactly is this?  Sorry for the noob question.  All I see is an ISO

Case: NZXT H500i. Motherboard: Asus Prime Z390-A. CPU: i7 9700k OC @ 5.0GHz. GPU: EVGA 2080 FTW3 CPU Cooler: NZXT X62. Memory: G. Skill Ripjaws 32Gb 3200mhz. Storage: 1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD /  120GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD  /  WD Caviar Black 3TB / WD Caviar Green 4TB. . PSU: Corsair AX760. Monitor: 2x Acer XB270HU. Keyboard: Corsair K70 RGB. Mouse: Corsair Glaive. 

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If you have a camera record a video and set the directory to the HDD then format it and do it again I recommend this way for phones to

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What exactly is this?  Sorry for the noob question.  All I see is an ISO

Bootable disc for erasing your hard drives. DBAN stands for Darik's Boot-And-Nuke. Just burn the ISO to a CD, boot your PC from it and follow the instructions.

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As securely as you can.

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I second the Dban suggestion. Just make sure you wipe the drives you want, there is no going back...

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I normally just do disk part and clean. But then again I don't sell a lot of hhd's.

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http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-LLF-Low-Level-Format-Tool/

 

i use this tool to wipe my HDD when they got the Trojan that took my HDD hostage and ask me to pay a ransom to unlock it

 

 

works like a charm when the normal format fail to remove the virus

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Bootable disc for erasing your hard drives. DBAN stands for Darik's Boot-And-Nuke. Just burn the ISO to a CD, boot your PC from it and follow the instructions.

UNPLUG YOUR OTHER DRIVES FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SOMETIMES THEY ARENT LABELED PROPERLY IN SOFTWARE

 

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Bootable disc for erasing your hard drives. DBAN stands for Darik's Boot-And-Nuke. Just burn the ISO to a CD, boot your PC from it and follow the instructions.

 

 

What exactly is this?  Sorry for the noob question.  All I see is an ISO

 

You dont need to use a CD, theres an application called PowerISO.

http://poweriso.com/

Its free, but beware the bloatware in the install. When you go to do the thing, right click on the ISO file and go to "Mount Image to Drive"

It should work from then on

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You dont need to use a CD, theres an application called PowerISO.

http://poweriso.com/

Its free, but beware the bloatware in the install. When you go to do the thing, right click on the ISO file and go to "Mount Image to Drive"

It should work from then on

 

Can you make this a little more noob friendly?  Sorry.

Case: NZXT H500i. Motherboard: Asus Prime Z390-A. CPU: i7 9700k OC @ 5.0GHz. GPU: EVGA 2080 FTW3 CPU Cooler: NZXT X62. Memory: G. Skill Ripjaws 32Gb 3200mhz. Storage: 1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD /  120GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD  /  WD Caviar Black 3TB / WD Caviar Green 4TB. . PSU: Corsair AX760. Monitor: 2x Acer XB270HU. Keyboard: Corsair K70 RGB. Mouse: Corsair Glaive. 

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Can you make this a little more noob friendly?  Sorry.

When you download PowerISO, skip everything in the installer that is not necessary (theres bloatware on there)

After PowerISO is done installing, go to the ISO file you'd like to open, and right click

Now go down to where it says PowerISO and has a drop menu, there will be an option to "Mount Image to Drive"

That will make the ISO file act as if it is on a disk and show up under "My Computer"

Inside the file should be a exe or something, and dont extract it, just run from inside PowerISO

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DBAN is highly recommended and it's really easy to use, just burn the CD, put it in and select the drive. I would suggest you unplug your important drives when you do this as @TDP_Equinox said, sometimes drives aren't labelled as you would think.

Alternatively you could boot into a Ubuntu LiveCD and use the shred command to overwirte the whole disk with random data. You can use "fdisk -l" to get a list of drives with device names (eg. /dev/sda) then use "shred -v /dev/[The device you want to overwrite]". This will overwrite the entire drive with data 3 times, but you can add "-n [Number of times you want it to overwrite]" to do more. Also -z can be added to write "0"s over the whole drive after the random data. This is very secure and pretty easy, and Ubuntu LiveCD can be run from a USB stick.

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