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Hard drive active kill erase help

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    JustInTime is offline Metal Recycling Entrepreneur
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    Interesting this came up as I'm sitting here wiping the hard drives in several laptops. Perfect timing.

    First thing, the DoD 3 pass is overkill. One pass with a zero write is more than sufficient to securely remove data. I have one laptop that I booted up with Dban and I think it's only option is the Dod 3 pass, which takes for bloody ever. The other laptop, I booted up with an Acronis True Image boot disk which has a drive wipe utility in it. While I had the option to do the DoD 3 pass wipe, I stuck with the quicker zero pass, which writes zeros over every bit on the drive.

    I've been reading about it a lot over the last week or so and pretty much the experts conclusion is that even a zero write pass will make it **** near impossible to recover any data off of a hard drive and it certainly won't be recoverable using standard software tools like Recurva and such.



    To your other question, once the drive is wiped, right click on "Computer" (assuming this is Win 7, My Computer if XP), click Manage, then in the left window pane click Disk Management. The drive you just wiped will be the one in black saying "Unallocated". Right click on that, choose "Simple Volume", follow the prompts, use the defaults, do a quick format converting the drive to NTFS and you're good to go.

    Another thing I would do is download and install HD Tune Free. It reads the SMART info from the disk to determine health and also has another few health checks to run against the drive. This way it's a little more assurance that you're not selling someone a bum drive.

    Hope this helps.

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