disk wiping utility

[badgolferman]

What utility do you recommend for wiping hard drives clean? Preferably
it will boot from a floppy or CD-ROM and give me the option of choosing
which drive to wipe.

I have been using KillDisk but want to try something different.

 

[John Jay Smith]

Specialists have said that the only way to be sure no one can recover
information,
is to melt the drive to liquid form, or convert it to dust.

 

[Ben]

What utility do you recommend for wiping hard drives clean? Preferably
it will boot from a floppy or CD-ROM and give me the option of choosing
which drive to wipe.

DBAN, although IIRC it will wipe all attached drives, after prompting -
you'd need to disconnect any that you do not want wiped. In practise,
it's a good idea to do this anyway to prevent any nasty accidents!

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

HTH

Ben

 

[Al Klein]

Specialists have said that the only way to be sure no one can recover
information, is to melt the drive to liquid form, or convert it to dust.

Beating the platter(s) with a steel hammer makes it *nearly*
impossible to retrieve any data.

 

[badgolferman]

Beating the platter(s) with a steel hammer makes it nearly
impossible to retrieve any data.

Whatever happened to the big magnet theory? Is that still an option?

 

[Marten Kemp]

Whatever happened to the big magnet theory? Is that still an option?

From alt.books.tom-clancy:

From: Howard Berkowitz
Date: Mon, Oct 20 2003 4:05 pm

Not being familiar with that specific incident, I shall share one real
incident from Army Intelligence headquarters, then at Arlington Hall
Station.

They were scrapping an old SDS/XDS 940 computer on which compartmented
intelligence had been stored. The thing had a huge disk platter, a
couple of feet across, and there was no way it would fit into the
degausser.

A couple of engineers came up with the reasonable approach (which is
approved these days) of taking a sander to the oxide coating. A security
officer, however, told them sanding was not an approved technique.

"The number of approved techniques is three. Not two and not four.
First, degaussing."

"Won't fit in the degausser."

"Second, immersion in acid."

"We don't have any."

"Third, destruction by fire."

They knew the document incinerator had a fair sized door, so they pulled
the disk pack apart, bent the platters enough to fit through said door,
shoved it in, and turned on the gas furnace.

Shortly thereafter, they discovered the oxide coating had covered
magnesium.

--
-- Marten Kemp
(Fix name and ISP to reply)
-=-=-
.... "25 States allow anyone to buy a gun, strap it on, and walk down the
street with no permit of any kind: some say it's crazy. However, 4 out
of 5 US murders are committed in the other half of the country: so who
is crazy?" -- Andrew Ford
* TagZilla 0.059 * http://tagzilla.mozdev.org

 

[Huss]

Shortly thereafter, they discovered the oxide coating had covered
magnesium.

Was the incinerator in a confined space?

 

[Al Klein]

Was the incinerator in a confined space?

Before or after?

 

[Marten Kemp]

Before or after?

Go ask Howard. Afterward the incenerator may have *been* an open space.

--
-- Marten Kemp
(Fix name and ISP to reply)
-=-=-
.... Mitchell's Law of Committees: "Any simple problem can
made insoluble if enough meetings are called to discuss
it."
* TagZilla 0.059 * http://tagzilla.mozdev.org

 

[Doc]

What utility do you recommend for wiping hard drives clean? Preferably
it will boot from a floppy or CD-ROM and give me the option of choosing
which drive to wipe.

I have been using KillDisk but want to try something different.

Darik's Boot and Nuke

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

 

[Huss]

Before or after?

Hee, good point. I meant before, as it would help in calculating the
radius, since a confined space would have increased percussive power.

 

[Huss]

Darik's Boot and Nuke

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Eraser makes one too, but I'm reliably told that the order 'should' be 1
nuke, 2, magnet, 3 hammer, 4 disperse the bits over a wide area.

I don't want any one getting hold of my financial and similar secure
details, and am about to do the above.

 

[Roland Sommer]

What utility do you recommend for wiping hard drives clean?

http://www.killdisk.com/

 

[Franklin]

Whatever happened to the big magnet theory? Is that still an
option?

This article tells you all about erasing data:

"Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory"
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

It's definitely worth reading the original for detail on items like
this:

"A major issue which cannot be easily addressed
using any standard software-based overwrite
technique is the problem of defective sector
handling".

The article's conclusion says:

----------------------- QUOTE -------------------------
Data overwritten once or twice may be recovered by subtracting what
is expected to be read from a storage location from what is actually
read. Data which is overwritten an arbitrarily large number of times
can still be recovered provided that the new data isn't written to
the same location as the original data (for magnetic media), or that
the recovery attempt is carried out fairly soon after the new data
was written (for RAM). For this reason it is effectively impossible
to sanitise storage locations by simple overwriting them, no matter
how many overwrite passes are made or what data patterns are written.
However by using the relatively simple methods presented in this
paper the task of an attacker can be made significantly more
difficult, if not prohibitively expensive. -------------------- END
QUOTE ----------------------------------