i just received my new ibm t40, so that means my t30 is going to be sold soon.

can anyone recommend a product that'll wipe my hard drive clean? i know that when you delete and format, all the data is still there, but just not in file format. which means that anyone with decent recovery software can retrieve private information.

i've downloaded Eraser 5.7, but is there something better out there?

oh, i'd like to be able to keep the IBM partition for rapid restore, but i'd like to get rid of allll of my personal data.

thanks and all suggestion welcome!

 

Format c: ? Run a magnet over the HD?

 

Your good with Eraser. Its a great product, and best of all its free.

 

i'd like to be able to keep a portion of my hd untouched..

running a magnet would likely destroy everything on it and perhaps even the drive.

thanks anyways..

 

Personally, I would just run format c: and then remove the partitions. This will not destroy your data, but it will destroy the linkages to it. It is true that if someone really wants to, they can still restore your data.

Another option is to see if your BIOS has a low level format utility. These will write zeroes to the user accessible sectors of your hard drive. I believe it'll offer more protection, but ultimately, if someone wants to bad enough, they can still find your original data.

The bottom line is, there is little you can do to completely remove all of your data and make it absolutely unretrievable. Running a magnet over it isn't that far of a stretch if making your data 100% unrestorable is your goal. It would take that or something equally drastic.

 

One option is just to format the partition you want cleaned but don't do a quick format. A full format will overwrite any data on the drive permanently, enough to prevent any casual (read, not involving magnetic force microscopes and other hardware) recovery.

For more security, or if formatting the drive isn't an option, free utilities like these may help. They work by overwriting space not in use by any files so deleted files cannot be recovered.

This one will cleanse free space of deleted files for you - it's what I'd use for your purposes since it's quick and simple. It's a command-line tool, just do an "sdelete -z d:" to clean all free space on d: for example. Simply delete anything that you don't want recovered and run this tool.
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/sdelete.shtml

(sdelete will perform a DoD compliant secure delete - this should defeat even forensic data recovery).

PGP also has a free space wiper, but I don't know if it's included in the free version.
http://www.pgp.com/products/freeware.html

 

thanks lycean, i'll try those.

 

Look for something that claims to meet the DoD 5220-22m specification. That spec talks about "sanitizing" storage media. "Sanitized" erases do a number of disk writes to each sector using an algorithm that is believed to remove all useful residual magnetic data -- it should be erased enough that the drive can't be disassembled and analyzed to retrieve the data.

I'm sure there are $$$ utilities that do it, but there should be freeware ones available as well.

 

I don't know if this is possible, but maybe you can replace the entire HD and just do a clean install of Windows XP or 2000 or whatever.