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Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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I have a couple hundred de-commissioned PCs that need to have their hard drives wiped clean before they can be sent to surplus.

Bulk erasing with a powerful magnet has been proposed but I’m concerned that this will damage the drive mechanism. I’m inclined to use a wipedisk utility although this will be time-intensive.

Can anyone offer any opinions or experiences on methods they have used?

paul

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Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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I would go with FDISK. It will abviously blow away the entire drive partition, but if that is what you are looking to do, it is fairly quick.

From a DOS prompt, just run FDISK…option 3 allows you tro delete a Primary DOS partition. It blows away the entire partition, so data, OS, everything is gone.

If you are looking just to remove the data and leave a generic OS image on each PC, you can try using Ghost, setting up a generic image on the first machine, and then put that image on eachmachine after it.

Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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Unfortunately, the data is still recoverable – we’re a government agency so we have to make sure no confidential data can be recovered. But thanks for the Ghost idea – I’ll have to give that some thought!

Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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Our company does this routinely and we use a program called
* DECLASFY: WIll overwrite (declasify) hard drives. Its predecessor was certified by Air Force Cryptographic

There is another program out there called Erasor 2.0 that does a decent job. You can go to : http://www.lunerouge.com/freeware/freeware_e.htm

As far as the Fdisk idea. That isn’t bad but the data is still physically there. Hope this helps. Good luck.

Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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Thanks – that gives me two leads to check out!

Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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On startup, boot from the os disk. A blue screen will appear and ask you for clean install. The next option will ask you to go along with the install, create partitions, or delete partitions. Press C to delete selected partitions, select the drive, and press L to complete the process. It will take about 1 second to unformat the drive. This is the equivilant of fdisk. Just wanted to tell you about another option.

Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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I appreciate the idea but we need to make the data unrecoverable.

Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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If the PCs are to be sent to surplus, do they still remain your problem? If not, what is the problem with bulk erasing via magnetic fields?
You could always put a disclaimer as to the future (un)reliability 😉

Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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Well, one of our department heads suggested just drilling a hole through the drive, if that tells you anything. But these will be recycled to other agencies, most likely.

Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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Try Fdisk with the switch /w – this will wipe the disk and the FAT records. Remove all partitions and the disk should be clean.

JOHN

Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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Thanks – that’s a command line switch I wasn’t aware of.

Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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I started to answer this question with a “Paul, why are you asking us how to fdisk or type format from a boot floppy I know you know to do that?” Then I reread the question.. How many machines/drives? I have seen / heard of a device that is made to image hard drives for manufacturing purposes. I.E. Compaq takes 100 drives plugs them into this baby and propigates an image to them. Sort of like a hardware version of Ghost or DriveImage. I’ll see where you could get one and e-mail you. Then you could just format one drive call it the master and plug the other drives into it. I guess you could also boot the machines via a scipted boot floppy to format them, but that still sounds like a lot of work.

Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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I’m starting to think this might be on the right track – I want to make any data unrecoverable without damaging the drives. Thanks!

Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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Ok, I got the answer..
Soak them in water.

=)

Wiping Clean a Hard Drive

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Aaron – remember I live in Arizona! We have to steal our water from other states… 🙂
But thanks for the thought!

[Author]

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