Hi

I need to send my old netbook (note no CD drive) away for a cash back deal and want to do a total wipe of the hard disk. I can just reinstall Windows and I dont store personal data, but thought a total erase was probably safer. Anyone get on suggestions for good software to use, or am I worrying too much?

Cheers

DBAN http://www.dban.org/

Unless I’mmistaken there should be an option to format the hard drive. Doing so will whipe it clean of everything. I think.

Yep use DBAN.

Unless I’mmistaken there should be an option to format the hard drive. Doing so will whipe it clean of everything. I think.

Wrong. Other answers are good.

Linux boot from usb to launch it.

+1 DBAN

Unless I’mmistaken there should be an option to format the hard drive. Doing so will whipe it clean of everything. I think.

It is still possible to recover the data as formating just erases the table of contents and not the actual files. You have to overwrite every bit repeatedly to ensure files can’t be recovered. Although to get back data after one overwrite you need to take the platters out and use a special head to try and back previous values, which is into serious espionage territory. In theory something like 7 over writes are needed as the head isn’t perfectly aligned so the old value can be seen from magnetic ‘ghosts’ from previous head miss-alignments.

Personally I just put a drill through my old hard drives and trash the platters.

Drill won’t do it either. For complete death drill large hole, fill disc case with vim or similar abrasive powder and power up the drive for a wee while. Ex forensics investigator and clean room operative with far too much experience recovering ‘destroyed’ drives ! But DBAN works as well for the most part. I keep all my disks even after the treatment above, irrational but then i like my d0nkey p0rn 😯

if you want to erase everything try killdisk which can erase to a forensic level but you need to do a bit of dos stuff to get it working.

Depend how deep you want to erase.

Unless you have some desire to hit things with a hammer

NAME shred – delete a file securely, first overwriting it to hide its contents
SYNOPSIS
shred [OPTIONS] FILE […]
DESCRIPTION
Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data.

Boot up Knoppix from a memory stick

shred -vfz -n 10 /dev/{Drive}

Overwrites the entire disc with random data 10 times then writes the entire disc with Zero’s.
http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-securely-destroy-wipe-data-on-hard-drives-with-shred

Normally about 3 overwrites is enough – technically 1 should do as beyond that recovery is into the theoretical. This was the US DOD standard but they swapped to crush/industrial shredder probably as people didn’t believe that a software wipe would work.

A word of caution this method has NO UNDO BUTTON