removing all files from hard disk

[Guest]

Greetings-
A friend needs to remove all files from a hard disk before she returns a
defective laptop to the dealer. The computer will not be returned to her.
She wants everything off the hard disk before she turns it in.

Please suggest the easiest way to accomplish this.

 

[Guest]

Does she have a boot disk ?? She can do a Fdisk if she does if not look for a
program called eraser this is the website http://www.killdisk.com/ they have
a free program that works real good.

 

[H. S.]

Does she have a boot disk ?? She can do a Fdisk if she does if not look for a
program called eraser this is the website http://www.killdisk.com/ they have
a free program that works real good.

:

If she wants to remove *every file*, then:
1) Boot with a knoppix CD
2) Mount the hard disk as rw.
3) use this command:
$> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdaX

to write zeros to a partition, where hda is the disk (yours could be hdb
, hdc, etc) and X is the parition number. Examples: hda1, hda2 ...

Doing this twice or thrice is sufficient for casual purposes. Do this
for all partitions.

->HS

 

[Malke]

Greetings-
A friend needs to remove all files from a hard disk before she returns
a
defective laptop to the dealer. The computer will not be returned to
her. She wants everything off the hard disk before she turns it in.

Please suggest the easiest way to accomplish this.

If you are talking about a complete wipe, I use the free Darik's Boot
and Nuke (dban) from http://dban.sourceforge.net/ .

Malke

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your suggestion.
Joan
--
Joan

Does she have a boot disk ?? She can do a Fdisk if she does if not look for a
program called eraser this is the website http://www.killdisk.com/ they have
a free program that works real good.

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Greetings-
A friend needs to remove all files from a hard disk before she returns a
defective laptop to the dealer. The computer will not be returned to her.
She wants everything off the hard disk before she turns it in.

Please suggest the easiest way to accomplish this.

To protect your friend's personal information and data from any
future users of average skills, you should, at the very least, format
the hard drive. If you wish to do a more thorough job of protecting
your friend's personal data, WipeDrive 2.2.1
(http://www.accessdata.com/Product07_Overview.htm?ProductNum=07) meets
U.S. DoD standards for securely cleaning surplus unclassified hard
drives, and could be used before formatting and reinstalling the OS and
applications.


--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having
both at once. - RAH

 

[David Sewell]

Greetings-
A friend needs to remove all files from a hard disk before she returns a
defective laptop to the dealer. The computer will not be returned to her.
She wants everything off the hard disk before she turns it in.

Please suggest the easiest way to accomplish this.

I use "killdisk" for that kind of thing.

David