Wipe Disk

[Emerenciana Mcgreal]

Forexample Red Hat 5

Maybe this can even be loaded as a livecd? Guess you just need to put the drivers for the storage controller on the disc. Drivers for that can be found in the link above.

And then from within linux I bet there are applications for Linux to properly eraze all the contents on a disk.

Maybe the softwares you tried above are based in Red Hat? Then maybe the drivers for Red Hat in the link above can be put on the disc and then the program will work?

I just used the secure erase option in Intelligence Provisioning and it says it erased 25 146GB drives in less than a minute, is this normal ? Just wondering if it really erased them ? I'm now running boot and nuke and it says it will take 2 hours and twenty minutes to finish. Anybody have any experience with Intelligence Provisioning secure erase ?

* Number of licenses corresponds to the number of disks you can erase in parallel:Freeware license can erase 2 drives concurrently on one machine1 user license can erase 2 drives concurrently on one machine2 user licenses can erase 2 drives concurrently on 2 machines3 user licenses can erase 3 drives concurrently on 3 machines# user licenses can erase # drives concurrently on # machinesSite and Enterprise licenses: unlimited concurrent erasures and installations

Active@ KillDisk gives you a fast, easy way to delete your files and folders for good if you're getting rid of your hard drive. While it's not as advanced as some other permanent deletion programs, it offers enough bonus features to keep you interested. The professional, welcoming look earns it a few extra points.

Simply deleting files, or even formatting the disk, does nothing to stop a determined snoop. This program, a powerful (and free!) set of tools, promises to do something much more useful. ...... once the program has done its job, there is no turning back.

We have been using this to satisfy data wiping requirements at the university before disposing of old equipment. It is very simple to use so we are able to have workstudies wiping the drives. It does take several hours on a 3 pass wipe, but I don't think anything can be done about the time due to the nature of what the software has to do. It would be nice if there were audible or more obvious visual prompts that a wipe has completed, so the workstudy can see at a glance without looking at the small status window.

If you have ever found yourself in the situation where you want to delete multiple drives, whether it is because of some confidential data that you want to get rid of or maybe some nasty virus has plagued your drives and you have no ways of removing it, then Active@ KillDisk might be the best solution for you. Active@ KillDisk is a data security application that permanently deletes any data on physical disk drives without any chance of recovering it.

At some point in time all of come to a situation where privacy or business might be in danger of unwanted leaks. This does not to be a situation where you might be an outlaw running from the police, you are just might an ordinary person who wants sell his old HDD.

How can I do a disk low level formatting in Ubuntu on an external hard disk so that any data recovery tools like test-disk or photorec cannot retrieve any data once formatted to ext4 or any file-system? As I was playing around with Test disk, I found that it can recover almost all old files even after formatting it many times and I want to use my external hard disk as new because it is only one year old and in warranty but without any old data.

Modern discs implement the ATA secure erasefeature, which you can do with the hdparm command using the --security-erase option, after first setting a password on the disk. Note that there are caveats, including

For some discs this will take hours, as each block is rewritten. For others it can take seconds as it just means changing a global encryption key held by the disc that transparently encrypts/decrypts all data going to/from the disk.This is true for hard discs and SSDs. It's the firmware than counts.

Another article alsosuggests that --security-erase has the advantage that it may also wipeout the hidden areasHPA host protected areaand DCO device configuration overlay.

This command is a replacement for rm command. It works under Linux/BSD/UNIX-like OSes. It removes each specified file by overwriting, renaming, and truncating it before unlinking. This prevents other people from undelete or recovering any information about the file from the command line. Because it does lots of operation on file/directory for secure deletion, it also takes lot of time to remove it.

If this is really important data that should never be recovered, it's not safe to use the disk any more. Apple Macs offer a 35 overwrite feature - which they claim is what the government requires, but it's complicated:

Effective immediately, DSS will no longer approve overwriting procedures for the sanitization or downgrading (e.g. release to lower level classified information controls) of IS storage devices (e.g., hard drives) used for classified processing.

The dd command by Maythux is a good one to go with, though I've read somewhere (sorry for no source!) that it's good to overwrite with zeros then do a second pass with random writes, then zero it off on a third pass.

Data which are really sensitive might be considered undeniably safe only when the physical drive is destroyed, since, theoretically [but not too much] (placeholder for the link if I ever manage to find it again) laboratory methods capable of measuring differences in the magnetic / electronic fields of a support, joined with the knowledge of the algorithm used by firmware of the drive to handle the data might be able to extract even data that has been overwritten multiple times.

However, for the purpose of erasing a hard disk containing personal data, each of the methods above will work fine against a software recovery attempt; it might be noted, however, that methods using low-level utilities are not good to be used on SSDs, for multiple reasons.

The first one being that writing a flash-based memory (expecially multiple times) is not really healthy for the memory itself, altough the wear-leveling issue is highly overestimated (expecially on MLC SSDs), i.e.: you indeed don't want to dd a SSD drive every day, but once, twice or even thrice (or even more) in its whole life-span is absolutely not a big deal;

The second one being the fact that commercial SSDs usually come with additional replacement cells, which are initially not being used by the drive, and which are intended to act as a replacement for cells being damaged during the usage of the drive; this leading to, possibly, the SSD controller unmapping such damaged cells (possibly containing sensitive informations) at some point of the drive's life making them physically inaccessible from low-level tools.

So, if you're using a SSD, the best solution is probably sticking to the manufacturer's ATA SECURE_ERASE command implementation (as described in meuh's answer), hoping that this will be robust enough for the purpose.

Some decrepit old fools like me still twist our sentences into pretzel shapes to avoid using the word "formatting" alone because that's ambiguous. For years, in the Unix/Linux world, high-level formatting was always referred to as creating a filesystem. The word "formatting" has been creeping into various utilities in this context, though.

It's important to note that, to the best of my knowledge, no modern hard disk supports low-level formatting by users; that task is done at the factory and cannot be done again once the disk leaves the factory. Hard disks in the 1980s and maybe into the early 1990s did support low-level formatting by users, but those disks are all museum pieces by now. You can still low-level format a floppy disk, if your computer is old enough to actually have one. This was often necessary with floppies, since different computers (Macs vs. PCs, say) used different types of low-level formats, so if you got a Mac floppy and wanted to use it on a PC (or vice-versa), you'd have to low-level format it.

Also and FWIW, I looked into it a few years ago, and I could find no references to actual tools that could be used to recover data from a disk that had been wiped by using dd to zero out all its sectors. It's theoretically possible to do so by disassembling the disk and using special hardware to read it. If the disk holds national security secrets, going beyond dd might be advisable (and is required by many national security agencies); but I wouldn't worry about protecting your credit card numbers and Flickr password with anything beyond dd, at least on a hard disk. SSDs use fundamentally different technology and I've not looked into them in any depth.

It is overkill. A standard three-pass overwrite - clearing with zeros, filling with ones, then overwriting with a random string of either - is industry recognised and still the defacto means to certifiably sanitize a hard drive. If your drive is without bad sectors and the eraser can access all addressable areas - your data is gone.

Infact, there are good reasons why a single pass might well be enough. There is really only one clinical circumstance where data could "theoretically" be recovered under laboratory conditions: by using 'some sort of' molecular magnetic microscopy on what would have ideally been a previously clean (and preferably intact) drive - measuring the minute differences in residual charge thought to represent previous logical values and then reconstructing bit by bit with the aid of probability analysis. It is vague and deemed to be so prohibitively expensive - especially for newer hard drives - that it is questionable whether some agencies could be capable of even justifying the attempt. Your data certainly isn't worth it!

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