Ok I am disposing of my old Windows 98 computer and I am wiping out the hard drive for separate disposal. I downloaded Darik's Boot and Nuke and extracted it to a floppy disk. I have formatted my non-Windows partitions and deleted almost everything on the C: drive.

I booted up from the floppy and read through various screens explaining options and stuff. I started the wiping procedure and I was supposed to select a method of wiping. There was Quick, the method used by the RCMP, the method used by the Department of Defense (both quick and full) and Gutmann. I chose the full DoD method because I think that it should be sufficient.

Is this actually sufficient to erase the hard drive? Or should I do another wipe after this with another method? I'm not particularly clear on security of hard disks, I just know that the more overwrites the harder it is to retrieve data.

Last I checked the DoD protocol is supposed to be to write zeros to every iota, including the boot sector, of the HD in question. That would certainly be sufficient to clean any data irretrievably.

This post has been edited by Darasen: May 15 2008, 05:15 PM

if it actually performs the DoD level erase it completely swipes every bit of the drive to 0's, then 0's, then 0's, etc I believe something like 30 times ensuring that every single bit, even if there are errors in one or two of the swipes, is switched to a 0 by the end. This not only destroys the ability to access the table by killing the indexing system of the drive but literally wipes every single bit clean of whatever data was held there so regardless of efforts put forth there is no way to return the data to its original form. So if it's just one drive the DoD wipe should be fine, but if you are that worried...for whatever reason... then just do it again haha. If its just the one drive, and its a 98 era drive, it cant be that huge so shouldn't take that long. But if the only personal data is like game saves and some personal emails and stuff any type of drive wiping utility should be fine.

i think it wipes everything but i use a cipher but you have to clear the harddrive(format) install an os and then run cihper goes though files which you think are gone but are invisable ready to overwrite goes changing random ly the bits bit by bit
but i like your method

Most methods do more than just overwriting every sector with zero's. Overwriting it with zero's is just one of the many steps that are taken, sometimes it overwrites the data with ones, fixed numbers, random numbers, ...
Anyway, most methods are secure enough for most users, I don't think anybody is going to pay a few thousands of dollars to read out a disk that you've erased using one of those methods . Doing a simple low level format should be enough too (overwrites every sector on your disk with zero's, only one step).

At the risk of nit picking a bit is either a 1 or a 0.

This also touches on the topic of erasing hard drives. I've always wondered say. If you don't have a shredding utility running in the background that handles all your file deleting chores, say someone were to delete a file, and empty the recycle bin. Sure you can recover the file depending or not if anything was recording on the hard drive location. So here is the question. Is there anything out there that will clean a drive with an OS already installed by writing zeros on a drives' empty space; thereby, getting rid of the no shredded files.

If there is let me know, especially if it is something that is free or some form of open source.

Thanks in advance. By the way I use CCleaner. with a recycle bin option but there are times I don't use it to delete files or extra copies of files.

I would imagine such a program exists... I dont know of any but they must. I mean you likely wouldn't want one that is constantly doing like a 30 passover wipe of every files storage location when you delete it but having one to run on occasion to clear out the debris would be a good way to ensure any sensitive data is gone forever after deleting it.

There is no perfect way of erasing the data and contents of your hard drive. Even if you wipe over you data again and again, there will always be a way to partially restore the data. However, such data recovery procedures are not commonly or readily available.

This should wipe the drive clean of anything. However, why would you want to zero out the drive? The only reason is if you have very important data you don't want people to ever see. This is a rare move for many computer users. However, once you do it, there's no going back.

xboxrulz