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Best free hdd wiping software

GeorgeKellow
By GeorgeKellow
in Storage Devices
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Selling an old harddrive , whats the best thing to wipe it clean so that nobody can ever find whats on it ;)

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On April 18, 2016 at 8:46 PM, Huntsman said:

A hammer.

after that, he can't sell those drives.. lol

 

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A Ubuntu CD on a USB stick which you just run live and then use  this as root from the command line 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=4k

Where the X in /dev/sdX needs to be replaced with the number of your drive (which you can find out using fdisk -l). Clears the entire drive to zeros which puts it beyond the restore capabilities of any current commercial company in the world today. There might be a government agency that could restore some data from it but its extremely unlikely. Definitely 100% safe for a resale and cheap and easy and fast.

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On 18.04.2016 г. at 3:20 PM, GeorgeKellow said:

~snip~

 

Hi :)

 

Pretty much any zero-writing tool should be able to wipe the drive clean for you. People would need to work pretty hard or pay a lot of cash to a data recovery company to get any data off a zero-filled HDD. One tool that I can recommend is WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic. It has both the quick and the full zero fill options. The quick one erases the first and the last million sectors which basically renders the drive unreadable. The full options fills every sector with a zero.

 

Post back if you need more info :)

 

Captain_WD.

If this helped you, like and choose it as best answer - you might help someone else with the same issue. ^_^
WDC Representative, http://www.wdc.com/ 

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Just now, Captain_WD said:

 

Hi :)

 

Pretty much any zero-writing tool should be able to wipe the drive clean for you. People would need to work pretty hard or pay a lot of cash to a data recovery company to get any data off a zero-filled HDD. One tool that I can recommend is WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic. It has both the quick and the full zero fill options. The quick one erases the first and the last million sectors which basically renders the drive unreadable. The full options fills every sector with a zero.

 

Post back if you need more info :)

 

Captain_WD.

Was wondering when you were going to show up ;) Thank you so much :)

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