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Nuking My Hard Drive

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by pctech26 1 view

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I know how to nuke a PC by using debug and fdisk. What I am looking for is a way to guarantee that there is no way of retrieving any data from a hard drive.

My company is giving away their old computers, but I must wipe everything from the hard drive and reinstall the OS. I also want something that will write ones and zeros on the hard drive to prevent any type of data recovery that the company views as sensitive information.

The operating systems I am working with are 95 and 98SE. Thank you in advance for your help!

9 replies

by pctech26

Thank you for the direction. Actually, I already downloaded sure delete, but was looking for something that would wipe the whole hard drive, and then start over.

by thechas

While the utilities can make it very difficult to recover any data from a drive, if the data is critical and sensitive, you best recourse is to melt down (nuke) the hard drive!

It does depend on the nature of the data, and how valuable it would be to an outside party.

There have been numerous discussions in the forums here, and the consensus is that for any hard drive with CRITICAl data, the ONLY way to assure that the data cannot be recovered is to physically destroy the platters on the hard drive.

Only you and your managers can determine if protecting the data is worth more than any re-use value of the hard drive.

Chas

by joseph moore

Norton Utilites 2002 has a component called Wipe Info that does the Department of Defense standard for data deletion (making 7 3-pass writes with Hex info over the sectors where the files to delete reside).

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