Fully Cleaning a Hard Drive

[ShaunKay]

Hi

 

I have thousands of pirated games and softwares on my hard drive. From now I have decided

only to use free or legal softwares

 

So my questions would be,

 

1) Would Dod 7 pass overwrite wipe all of the data on HDD and make it run like in the factory

state? I meant would it fully clean my hard drive?

 

2) On a forum I found I saw that filling the HDD with 0s would help to make sure that

every single data is gone. Is this true? If so how should I do it?

 

Thanks for any help

 

Btw It's a Seagate Barracuda 1TB Hard drive 

[scaryjam823]

If you want all the data gone open it up and break the platters. Otherwise it is still recoverable by someone  if they put enough time into it. Just format the drive and use it from there, it doesn't have to be that clean.

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, @ShaunKay!

 

Yes, writing zeroes will perform a full erase. 

I suggest you download the tool from your manufacturer, where you will find this option. 

This will wipe out all the data on the drive. It might take longer, but it helps to ensure that no data on the drive can be retrieved later using Data Recovery methods. 

 

Hope this helps.

[Jade]

Darik's Boot and Nuke can wipe it entirely (by writing 0s to everything, as others have said.) http://www.dban.org/