Wipe a hard drive completely

I've read recommendations for DBAN; and other for Eraser.
Both are small programs; the first runs from a boot CD, the latter
within Windows, which, I guess, precludes complete wipe of the System drive.

Does anybody do this regularly? If so, what's your favourite?

Ed

On 5/7/2018 1:28 PM, Ed Cryer wrote:
I've read recommendations for DBAN; and other for Eraser.
Both are small programs; the first runs from a boot CD, the latter
within Windows, which, I guess, precludes complete wipe of the System
drive.

Does anybody do this regularly? If so, what's your favourite?

Ed
I have used DBAN on machines being donated to charities in the past. In
my case management required the complete cleaning as the hard drives
usually were from lab or management areas of the company.

DBAN did a complete cleaning but to accomplish it you are writing to
every location multiple times. It was quite common for it to take
around 12 hours to "clean" the donated machines. All of those drives
were IDE, no idea how fast it can wipe a SATA drive.

There were faster options but we were using the DOD version of the menu.

ken1943 wrote:
On Mon, 7 May 2018 19:28:29 +0100, Ed Cryer
wrote:

I've read recommendations for DBAN; and other for Eraser.
Both are small programs; the first runs from a boot CD, the latter
within Windows, which, I guess, precludes complete wipe of the System drive.

Does anybody do this regularly? If so, what's your favourite?

Ed
Ccleaner can do it.


So it can. I chose Drive Wiper and the list given included the System C
disk.
Presumably if I choose that, it will shut down and start the run before
Windows loads.
Is that the case? How long does it take on a 1TB spinner?

Ed

On 5/7/2018 11:28 AM, Ed Cryer wrote:
I've read recommendations for DBAN; and other for Eraser.
Both are small programs; the first runs from a boot CD, the latter
within Windows, which, I guess, precludes complete wipe of the System
drive.

Does anybody do this regularly? If so, what's your favourite?

Ed
Why would anybody want to wipe their system drive "regularly"?
Eraser does a reasonable job of erasing the currently unused
parts of your system drive.
If it's a secondary drive, eraser can do the whole thing...but
why?

For ordinary stuff, a single write of the whole drive will
foil most people. Should be plenty for a drive you're gonna sell
or donate.

If you are a terrorist coordinator, you should smash the drive
with a sledge, melt it with your welding torch
and bury the slag at sea.

On 5/7/2018 1:23 PM, Ed Cryer wrote:
ken1943 wrote:
On Mon, 7 May 2018 19:28:29 +0100, Ed Cryer
wrote:

I've read recommendations for DBAN; and other for Eraser.
Both are small programs; the first runs from a boot CD, the latter
within Windows, which, I guess, precludes complete wipe of the System
drive.

Does anybody do this regularly? If so, what's your favourite?

Ed
Ccleaner can do it.


So it can. I chose Drive Wiper and the list given included the System C
disk.
Presumably if I choose that, it will shut down and start the run before
Windows loads.
Is that the case? How long does it take on a 1TB spinner?

Ed
How long does it take to just try it?

In article , Good Guy
wrote:

Just create several partitions and format it over and over again until
you know it is now safe. Start with 20 partitions then 15 then 10 then
5 then 2 and each time keep formatting.

reformatting and/or partitioning will make very little difference, if
any.

the data is still on the drive, it's just marked as free space, making
it very easy to scavenge.

Ed Cryer wrote:
I've read recommendations for DBAN; and other for Eraser.
Both are small programs; the first runs from a boot CD, the latter
within Windows, which, I guess, precludes complete wipe of the System
drive.

Does anybody do this regularly? If so, what's your favourite?

Ed

You can do this from diskpart.

list disk
select disk 1
clean all
exit

You could boot the machine with a Win10 installer DVD,
and use the Command Prompt window from Troubleshooting.
And run diskpart from there. (To save wear and tear on
an optical drive, Win10 can also be loaded onto a USB stick.)

"Clean all" zeros every sector on the disk, one pass.
This can take a couple hours.

The "Clean" command by comparison, only zeros out the MBR.
And isn't nearly enough if you're donating the drive to
someone.

After the disk has been treated, you can open a raw drive
with HxD and examine exactly what is on there. And convince
yourself that a thorough job was done. I might run this
from a "maintenance" boot drive.

https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

That's more than a hex editor for files, as there is a
menu item to open raw disk volumes.

Paul

Ed Cryer wrote:

I've read recommendations for DBAN; and other for Eraser.
Both are small programs; the first runs from a boot CD, the latter
within Windows, which, I guess, precludes complete wipe of the System drive.

Does anybody do this regularly? If so, what's your favourite?

Ed

You are upgrading your disks so quickly and often that you have lots of
old and smaller disks to wipe? If the disk dies, you can't wipe it, so
use a drill and sledgehammer. Other than when replacing a disk to
increase capacity or improve technology (HDD to SDD), I can't see why
you have a regular need to wipe drives.

Any wiper that is bootable will work. I've used Killdisk but it only
wipes by writing zeroes. There is a payware version of KillDisk that
has more options but is overpriced overkill compare to DBAN. Do not
bother with the 35-pass Gutmann method since that is for ancient drives
you would be hard pressed to even find nowadays. After 3 wipes (zeroes,
ones, pseudo-random), even the recovery labs can't get at the old data.

There are disks that have built-in firmware to wipe themselves called
Secure Erase. See:

https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-secure-erase-2626004

You would need a program that can issue the firmware command to the
drive to get the drive to erase itself. I think HDDerase does that.

VanguardLH wrote:
Ed Cryer wrote:

I've read recommendations for DBAN; and other for Eraser.
Both are small programs; the first runs from a boot CD, the latter
within Windows, which, I guess, precludes complete wipe of the System drive.

Does anybody do this regularly? If so, what's your favourite?

Ed

You are upgrading your disks so quickly and often that you have lots of
old and smaller disks to wipe? If the disk dies, you can't wipe it, so
use a drill and sledgehammer. Other than when replacing a disk to
increase capacity or improve technology (HDD to SDD), I can't see why
you have a regular need to wipe drives.

Any wiper that is bootable will work. I've used Killdisk but it only
wipes by writing zeroes. There is a payware version of KillDisk that
has more options but is overpriced overkill compare to DBAN. Do not
bother with the 35-pass Gutmann method since that is for ancient drives
you would be hard pressed to even find nowadays. After 3 wipes (zeroes,
ones, pseudo-random), even the recovery labs can't get at the old data.

There are disks that have built-in firmware to wipe themselves called
Secure Erase. See:

https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-secure-erase-2626004

You would need a program that can issue the firmware command to the
drive to get the drive to erase itself. I think HDDerase does that.


A salesman at PC World once told me that they wipe all HDs on returned
boxes. I didn't ask what they used.
Myself, I've wiped two on the garage floor; with a large hammer and
screwdriver. This time I'm going to age more gracefully, and take a more
gentle approach.

Ed

Ed Cryer wrote:
VanguardLH wrote:
Ed Cryer wrote:

I've read recommendations for DBAN; and other for Eraser.
Both are small programs; the first runs from a boot CD, the latter
within Windows, which, I guess, precludes complete wipe of the System
drive.

Does anybody do this regularly? If so, what's your favourite?

Ed

You are upgrading your disks so quickly and often that you have lots of
old and smaller disks to wipe? If the disk dies, you can't wipe it, so
use a drill and sledgehammer. Other than when replacing a disk to
increase capacity or improve technology (HDD to SDD), I can't see why
you have a regular need to wipe drives.

Any wiper that is bootable will work. I've used Killdisk but it only
wipes by writing zeroes. There is a payware version of KillDisk that
has more options but is overpriced overkill compare to DBAN. Do not
bother with the 35-pass Gutmann method since that is for ancient drives
you would be hard pressed to even find nowadays. After 3 wipes (zeroes,
ones, pseudo-random), even the recovery labs can't get at the old data.

There are disks that have built-in firmware to wipe themselves called
Secure Erase. See:

https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-secure-erase-2626004

You would need a program that can issue the firmware command to the
drive to get the drive to erase itself. I think HDDerase does that.


A salesman at PC World once told me that they wipe all HDs on returned
boxes. I didn't ask what they used.
Myself, I've wiped two on the garage floor; with a large hammer and
screwdriver. This time I'm going to age more gracefully, and take a more
gentle approach.

Ed

They would use Secure Erase, a command in the ATA command set.

The benefit of this command is supposed to be, even if the drive
is powered off, as soon as the drive receives power again, it
continues to work on the "posted" Secure Erase command, until
the job is complete.

In a sense, you need a computer to initially issue the command,
but there is no "crowding" of SATA ports, because it doesn't
have to be connected to a SATA port to finish.

Before I returned my first SSD to the store (after it turned out
to be much slower than the value written on the tin), I used
Secure Erase to return it to factory state before taking it back.
The ToolKit for the product, had a Secure Erase button. For
hard drives, there is a standalone application for the job
(HDDErase ???). The CMRR site is gone now, but can be located
on archive.org .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDDerase

https://web.archive.org/web/20151230...ure-Erase.html

There is no particular benefit to you, to use the command,
as any one of a number of other "direct" methods is good
enough. The above is just of academic interest, to show
there is a different way to do it.

I did use HDDerase on a hard drive here, just to test it,
but I don't know what happened to the drive I used. I wrote
the Secure Erase password on the outside of the drive, and
I haven't seen such a drive around here recently.

Paul

"Ed Cryer" wrote in message
news
I've read recommendations for DBAN; and other for Eraser.
Both are small programs; the first runs from a boot CD, the latter within
Windows, which, I guess, precludes complete wipe of the System drive.

Does anybody do this regularly? If so, what's your favourite?


I used DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke), booting from CDs, to wipe two 120GB
laptops so that they could be given to charity.
Each took about 10 hours.

--
Regards
wasbit

GlowingBlueMist wrote:
On 5/7/2018 1:28 PM, Ed Cryer wrote:
I've read recommendations for DBAN; and other for Eraser.
Both are small programs; the first runs from a boot CD, the latter
within Windows, which, I guess, precludes complete wipe of the System
drive.

Does anybody do this regularly? If so, what's your favourite?

Ed
I have used DBAN on machines being donated to charities in the past.Â* In
my case management required the complete cleaning as the hard drives
usually were from lab or management areas of the company.

DBAN did a complete cleaning but to accomplish it you are writing to
every location multiple times.Â* It was quite common for it to take
around 12 hours to "clean" the donated machines.Â* All of those drives
were IDE, no idea how fast it can wipe a SATA drive.

There were faster options but we were using the DOD version of the menu.

I'd like to donate some old machines to charities.
The ideal position would be to just do a factory-reset. I buy OEM
machines. That would be simple, and helpful for the charity.
BUT, that would leave my bank accounts, credit and debit cards, friends'
email addresses, etc. Enough for some enterprising crook to steal my
identity and last penny.

Doing a full DBAN wipe removes the latter possibility, but it also
removes the ability to boot.

I wonder if I could wipe every partition except the Recovery Partition;
and then somehow restore from that. I suppose a simple copy of its
contents to the C partition (after DBAN) wouldn't suffice.

Maybe install some Linux distro.

Ed

On 5/8/2018 8:46 AM, Ed Cryer wrote:
Snip
I'd like to donate some old machines to charities.
The ideal position would be to just do a factory-reset. I buy OEM
machines. That would be simple, and helpful for the charity.
BUT, that would leave my bank accounts, credit and debit cards, friends'
email addresses, etc. Enough for some enterprising crook to steal my
identity and last penny.

Doing a full DBAN wipe removes the latter possibility, but it also
removes the ability to boot.

What we do is to run a small free program that reports the current OS
and license key that the machine is using prior to running DBAN. Then
after DBAN we re-install that same version of Windows and use that
recovered license to activate the fresh copy.

If your machines license is an upgrade license you might need to install
the original (older version) and then go through the upgrade process to
bring the machine up to it's present OS. Either way if done correctly
there should be no cost other than the time it takes to accomplish the task.

If the machine is already running Windows 10 then there is no problem as
the machine will re-activate itself after you reinstall Windows 10, just
as if you replaced a defective hard drive. It might help if you read up
on how to reinstall W10 after replacing a hard drive before you begin.

Older retail versions of Windows can still be downloaded, burned to a
DVD, and used to install the OS. If the license matches the sticker on
the box it is even easier. OEM version of DVD's can be purchased on
Ebay for next to nothing should the box be a Dell or HP.

On Tue, 08 May 2018 09:49:51 -0400, Wolf K wrote:

On 2018-05-08 05:58, wasbit wrote:
"Ed Cryer" wrote in message
news
I've read recommendations for DBAN; and other for Eraser.
Both are small programs; the first runs from a boot CD, the latter
within Windows, which, I guess, precludes complete wipe of the System
drive.

Does anybody do this regularly? If so, what's your favourite?


I used DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke), booting from CDs,Â* to wipe two
120GB laptops so that they could be given to charity.
Each took about 10 hours.


Do you know how many over-writes that involved?

That's typical of this NG. I defy anyone (even including Good Guy, who is
by his own account very intelligent) to recover data after an overwrite
of all zero's. Yes I know supposedly the NSA and the whatever the old KBG
is these days, can attempt it, as maybe some data recovery outfits might.
But nobody getting your old hd or machine can except people here in their
dreams. Same goes for cracking TrueCrypt or VeraCrypt.
The simplest approach would be to simply use the dd command or do as Paul
suggested.

Wolf K wrote:

On 2018-05-08 10:55, Dave wrote:
On Tue, 08 May 2018 09:49:51 -0400, Wolf K wrote:

On 2018-05-08 05:58, wasbit wrote:
"Ed Cryer" wrote in message
news I've read recommendations for DBAN; and other for Eraser.
Both are small programs; the first runs from a boot CD, the latter
within Windows, which, I guess, precludes complete wipe of the System
drive.

Does anybody do this regularly? If so, what's your favourite?


I used DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke), booting from CDs,* to wipe two
120GB laptops so that they could be given to charity.
Each took about 10 hours.


Do you know how many over-writes that involved?

That's typical of this NG. I defy anyone (even including Good Guy, who is
by his own account very intelligent) to recover data after an overwrite
of all zero's. Yes I know supposedly the NSA and the whatever the old KBG
is these days, can attempt it, as maybe some data recovery outfits might.
But nobody getting your old hd or machine can except people here in their
dreams. Same goes for cracking TrueCrypt or VeraCrypt.
The simplest approach would be to simply use the dd command or do as Paul
suggested.

I wanted to confirm my arithmetic that at 12GB/hour it looks like just
one pass.

I used Recuva on an a external drive that had been reformatted twice.

You don't know how reformatting works? Nothing is written in the
clusters occupied by the files. Unless a previously used cluster (now
marked *available* for reuse) gets overwritten, like when populating it
with a new file, the old data remains there indefinitely.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/.../data-recovery

The old data still left inside a cluster could be immediately destroyed
by a new file using that cluster or it could remain there for year
(theoretically forever) waiting for that cluster to get reused (i.e.,
overwritten).

There are LOTS of tools that can recover data from the untouched
clusters after a format. I think the first undelete tool appeared back
in MS/IBM-DOS. Better tools showed up. I remember Undelete back in
Central Point's PC Tools for DOS (that Symantec/Norton swallowed up and
made disappear): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Tools_(software).

That being said, I agree with your sentiment that there's a tad or two
too much paranoia floating around here. :-)

One pass (all zeros) is sufficient for consumer-grade reuse of hard
disks. Obviously the more passes then the more time it takes: N passes
will take N times as long as a single pass. 3 varying passes (zeroes
and then ones to force dipole realign to destroy remnance and then
pseudo-random) makes it impossible for the recovery labs with their
clean rooms and magnetic force microscopes to recover any data (and NSA
is using the same gear or they farm it out to a recovery lab). This
might be what DBan's DOS Short Erase selection does. I only know it
does 3 passes but I don't know what each one does. Maybe it does the
following which is what I figured was more than sufficient to guard
against gov't snoops:

https://www.lifewire.com/dod-5220-22-m-2625856

For the paranoids, the Secure Erase built into the firmware of the hard
disk guarantees no one gets at the data unless they dismantle the drive
while not powered and got to the disk just after Secure Erase was
started to power down the drive. Once started, Secure Erase will resume
when power is reestablished to the disk. NSA would have to sieze the
disk before the user could start Secure Erase or shortly thereafter and
NOT power up the drive thereafter and instead have to dismantle it and
move the platters to another disk or use a recovery lab.

For the paranoids, most software-based erasers only touch partitionable
sectors; i.e., those that can be allocated in the MBR/UEFI as a
partition. They do not erase the MBR/UEFI cylinder on the disk nor do
they wipe the sectors that got remapped by the drive (disks have a
reserve for remapping of bad sectors - data gets copied to a reserve
sector but the old data remains in the old sector now marked bad and
cannot be reused or even accessed by the OS or by software). To get at
the remapped sectors and other hidden areas, you have to pay to get the
payware version of DBAN (aka Blancco Drive Eraser) or use HDDerase (have
the drive's firmware do the wipe). Users cannot get to the old bad
sectors that got remapped but magnetic force microscopes can used in
recovery labs, so I suspect Blancco Drive Eraser uses Secure Erase which
is the disk's firmware and what HDDerase also uses.

I haven't bothered to investigate what happens when trying to software
wipe a RAID setup (where the RAID config gets erased and not when
dismantling the RAID to wipe each drive individually).