Hard Drive Erase Software. Requirements For Selling Hard Drives

I've purchased a hard drive docking station that holds 2.5, 3.5 SATA and IDE hard drives. I want to erase the information within the hard drives I've collected and start selling them. There are many free data-erase software programs out there but I want to have something that says it is certifiable. I don't mind paying for the software to allow this but many of the ones I have researched say they are only good for use 3 times and then you must buy the software again (this is no good, as I have 60 hard drives). Anyone knowledgeable about this?

Here is an article 5 Free Programs to Completely Wipe a Hard Drive

Hi Jeremiah,

Check out About DBAN | Darik's Boot And Nuke. Deriks boot and nuke is what I have used and works very very well as far as I know. It's open source and free for use.

*edit - sorry, I dont think it is certified so never mind that.

I'm thinking of going with this software How to erase hard drive? Video presentation

The professional pack says it is unlimited and operates under 17 standards.

I've tried that and it was so slow.But it could be because i was running on a old 600 mhz laptop

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Originally Posted by NMatheson

Hi Jeremiah,

Check out About DBAN | Darik's Boot And Nuke. Deriks boot and nuke is what I have used and works very very well as far as I know. It's open source and free for use.

*edit - sorry, I dont think it is certified so never mind that.

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I use Darik's Boot And Nuke and it works great - Its easy to use

hard drive erase | eBay
I've found some programs on ebay.

What is the importance of certifying the Hard Drive is clean to the Buyer?
When they format the drive for their system, wouldn't any information be lost?

Wouldn't the party supplying you with the Drives be the one wanting the certification?

Or am I not understanding the operation?

I use this program Disk Wipe - Free software I think as far as certified goes. That comes from you saying your going to wipe the drives not the software used to wipe it.

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Originally Posted by PartTimeScrapper

I use this program Disk Wipe - Free software I think as far as certified goes. That comes from you saying your going to wipe the drives not the software used to wipe it.

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I'm thinking that if anyone who donated a computer to me had their identity stolen were to bring me into a court of law and asked me to prove the hard drive within their computer was not responsible for their identity theft I would need to either show that their hard drive was destroyed or professionally wiped. This was my reasoning for wanted to meet the dod standards.

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Originally Posted by JohnC4X4

What is the importance of certifying the Hard Drive is clean to the Buyer?
When they format the drive for their system, wouldn't any information be lost?

Wouldn't the party supplying you with the Drives be the one wanting the certification?

Or am I not understanding the operation?

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when formatting it will all be erased But it can still be recovered from some software. there a program called no file recovery is to ensure no data will be recovered.But it rarely is recovered(only by identity thieves) And most wont take there time when they have plenty of more drives to look at. And there's no certifications. Just your word of honor.You can use label stickers to not misplace any formatted or non formatted hard drives. like in this image

http://www.veritysystems.com/assets/...sed-labels.jpg

Yep so you use a program like I just said and take screen shot of the program when it finishes the wipe. THe screenshot will have all the drives info and the fact it completed the wipe. Im wiping one as we speak so ill post of screenshot of it in a few. Now if you really want to protect yourself from a lawsuit then you need to get yourself some liabilty insurance and form a LLC.

Here is a screen pic of erase in progress you will notice at the bottum of the screen the progress box shows what disk is being erased and the status.
[IMG]http://i49.tinypic.com/a3hykk.png[/IMG]

I've always used manufacturers disk tools software, every manufacturer has free ones, although some (like older Fujitsu) were harder to come by, even then, you can boot it in with another manufacturers drive as slave, and use the same tools on off brands. Every major HDD manufacturer has these freely accessible for DL from their website. If I was concerned about a virus seeping over a format, I'd let it write zeros to the entire drive, but later found that to be unnecessary. These are good enough to keep anything from "going over" a format, onto a new installation. If you are totally concerned about someone hacking info off of one beyond this, beat it to pieces with a hammer, run it through a shredder, burn it in an incinerator, and keep the ashes under your pillow :) (I'd never attempt to reuse a drive with such secret info on it, and if you are asking about it here, you have no business being in such a drives possession ; )

Thanks for the comments everyone. I've dowloaded a free program from killdisk and used it to wipe a hard drive of mine (took about an hour). I've decided i'm going to go with their professional pack for $49.99 as it allows you to do a couple extra things that would be nice as well as passes some 17 security standards. I think the free version would do just as well, but, I've had my share of civil court suites from my landscaping business and I think I will feel better spending the $50. I also want to test market offering this service of wiping data for a fee and providing the customer with a printout. I don't see any large demand for it, but I do have a couple computer shops I do business with who might outsource some work to me.

While reasearching wipe software I found a couple cool products. Some wipe software allows you to wipe everything but the opperating system which would be awesome if you had your hands on newer laptop/computer that you wanted to sell.

I use the following programs.

Hard Drive Eraser
Kill Disk
Wipe drive

All easily findable on google.

I use DBAN. You can do multiple hard drives. I have wiped over a 1000 computers with this software. Reliable, quick and easy to use

I noticed CCleaner has a driver wipe. Never used it but noticed it on there when i was doing a reg scan

I use and recommend DBAN myself. It's the only free program out there that will do multiple drives at once. There have been plenty of times I've had 10 - 12 drives wiping simultaneously on my wipe system. I only recommend doing that many drives at once on a system with high BUS bandwidth. Very handy.

If anyone knows of another wiper that will handle multiple drives at the same time I'd like to know about it.

Im currently using media tools wipe. It can do up to 18 drives at once. Wasnt free bit it works very well.

PTS how do you like the mediatools wipe compared to the Disk Wipe or Dban? Is it any faster or is it just as slow as the rest?? I am wiping a 320Gb SATA drive and as always on large drives it takes forever!!
I like Dban on SCSI Ultra 320 drives, a 15K 300Gb drive wipes way faster than SATA.

Do you use the reporting feature to create reports showing the drive was wiped?

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Originally Posted by PartTimeScrapper

Im currently using media tools wipe. It can do up to 18 drives at once. Wasnt free bit it works very well.

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I like the mediatools software alot. Whats real nice is since I started using it I have been in constant email talks with the creator. He has implemented alot of the changed I told him abhout into his software to make it much friendlier to use. As far as time goes. Well let me put it this way. If i have any drives larger than 250gb I set them to be done when I go to bed and they are usualy done when I get up. As far as a report goes. Yes there is a printable report for each drive that you can print out after wipe is complete that pulls all the drive info off the drive and into the report.

I like this program because I use my main computer for the wiping stuff because I still havnt built my test bench up completly yet. So its windows based and seems to work well. I do use a 4 port startech dock conected via Esata so it goes pretty darn fast. Also with this program and my dock I can do 4 diferent size drives and when the smaller ones are done I can close them out plug in another drive and start again without stopping the other wipes.

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Originally Posted by PartTimeScrapper

Also with this program and my dock I can do 4 diferent size drives and when the smaller ones are done I can close them out plug in another drive and start again without stopping the other wipes.

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Yeah that is a big draw back to Dban cause you have to shut down to swap out drives. Also I have noticed lately that Dban has issues with some computers that have the memory card slots. I think I will have serious look at the Mediatools software. I don't have a ton of drives. Do you know if it can handle SCSI drives as well?
If not I could still use Dban for those.

Have you ever had to wipe zip disks before? I got some and the data was private so my only choice was to take the 1Gb zips apart and bend the platters or cut them up.

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Originally Posted by twmart

Yeah that is a big draw back to Dban cause you have to shut down to swap out drives. Also I have noticed lately that Dban has issues with some computers that have the memory card slots. I think I will have serious look at the Mediatools software. I don't have a ton of drives. Do you know if it can handle SCSI drives as well?
If not I could still use Dban for those.

Have you ever had to wipe zip disks before? I got some and the data was private so my only choice was to take the 1Gb zips apart and bend the platters or cut them up.

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Will wipe any drive that can be detected my disk manager. That even includes usb drives. Never dealt with zip drives sorry.

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Originally Posted by PartTimeScrapper

I like the mediatools software alot. Whats real nice is since I started using it I have been in constant email talks with the creator. He has implemented alot of the changed I told him abhout into his software to make it much friendlier to use. As far as time goes. Well let me put it this way. If i have any drives larger than 250gb I set them to be done when I go to bed and they are usualy done when I get up. As far as a report goes. Yes there is a printable report for each drive that you can print out after wipe is complete that pulls all the drive info off the drive and into the report.

I like this program because I use my main computer for the wiping stuff because I still havnt built my test bench up completly yet. So its windows based and seems to work well. I do use a 4 port startech dock conected via Esata so it goes pretty darn fast. Also with this program and my dock I can do 4 diferent size drives and when the smaller ones are done I can close them out plug in another drive and start again without stopping the other wipes.

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Terry can you provide a link to mediatools. I googled them and got several matches none were the obvious correct one, at least to me. Thank you, Mike.

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Originally Posted by miked

Terry can you provide a link to mediatools. I googled them and got several matches none were the obvious correct one, at least to me. Thank you, Mike.

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Hi Miked -

My name is Mike Fiato and I am a Product Manager with Prosoft Engineering and I have been the one working with Terry. Contact me and I can set you up with a 30 day demo, so you can try it out.
This is a new application for us , but we are adding new features all the time. Wipe should do everything you need.

For some reason I can't post a link. You find Wipe at prosofteng dot com. :)

Cheers,

mfiato at prosofteng dot com

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Originally Posted by miked

Terry can you provide a link to mediatools. I googled them and got several matches none were the obvious correct one, at least to me. Thank you, Mike.

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Dont know how this one got by me but here is the link mike. Some others pmed me wanting it as well but I couldnt reply inbox was full.
Mediatools Wipe - Disk Wiping Software For Windows | Prosofteng

do the hard drive docks permit hot swapping or do you have to still restart the computer between hard drive swaps?

Depends on the dock I guess. My docks allow me to hot swap. BUt I made sure to read that in the docs on the website before I bought them. I didnt want to reset my computer 100 time a week.

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Originally Posted by PartTimeScrapper

Depends on the dock I guess. My docks allow me to hot swap. BUt I made sure to read that in the docs on the website before I bought them. I didnt want to reset my computer 100 time a week.

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ok, sounds good, im willing to pay more if it can hot swap.

another question is my formatting software has the options for 1,3,7,35 passes, which one do you use?

I use dod 5220.22-m (h) its a 3 pass that does a random followed by 0's fallowed by 1's as i showed in another thred on the COD it took 70 minutes to do a 3 pass wipe on a 40gb drive. Would take over a day to do a 35 pass wipe.

Would anyone be willing to post some pics of their hard drive docking station? Sounds like something I might want to get.

Here is the one that I have.
All in 1 Dual HDD Hard Disk Dock Docking Station for 2 5" 3 5" SATA IDE USB Hub | eBay

There are many more to chose from here.
hard drive docking station | eBay

I am hoping to find a program that is compatible with a computer running Ubuntu 12.04. My computer has multi hot swap bays. Mike.

With Linux, you can simply use the "dd" command, no need for a program. In fact, I asked a computer geek/repair tech friend of mine and he was unaware of any wipe programs written for Linux, just the dd command.

Here's a link to a "how to" page on using the command: How to wipe a hard drive clean in Linux - a great resource for How To's from Wikia

Ok here is the deal. A command line wipe doesn't get rid of the info guys...I can do the same thing in windows and delete the partition. I can recover every bit of info with a simple software program.

You should be using software that is made for this like some of the ones mentioned above. You need to do a 3 pass at least...3 passes are DOD compliant and then there is a 7 pass which is NSA compliant. If a drive came from anywhere dealing with client info..ie many businesses...you need to be compliant with HIPPA. This is at the minimum 3 passes. And businesses like that require a COD (certificate of destruction)...OTHERWISE you and tge business can be sued if someone recovers data. True data destruction software will generate a COD for you for each drive...it gives the serial of the drive, some other specifics and the results of the data destruction...this is a MUST when dealing with HIPPA compliant clients....and really should be used all the time to CYA.

Make sure you KNOW what you are doing if telling businesses their drives are erased and then you resell them. Dont think you can grab a drive, hook it up and "format" said drive and everything is kosher. It can be a HUGE liability for you if you don't do things correctly and know what the heck you are doing.

Thanks for this thread everyone! Exactly what I was looking for. I've emailed them asking a question or two. I will be buying this software soon. (The MediaFiles software.) Thanks for the recommendation, Terry!

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Originally Posted by Mudlucky

Thanks for this thread everyone! Exactly what I was looking for. I've emailed them asking a question or two. I will be buying this software soon. (The MediaFiles software.) Thanks for the recommendation, Terry!

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Your welcome. Its mediatools not mediafiles. Ive been using it now for months and love it. the best part is they actually take my recommendations to make it better and put it into the software. Im still having some issues with the esata hook up with the 4 port dock but I dont think its related to the wiping software. I think its more windows related.

would wiping the drives clean bring in more money or removing the platters and all screws and recycling them as pieces? thoughts?
pluses and minues of each one?