How to whipe one's drive?

Exfoliate

Exfoliate

Geek Trainee
I don't really know anything about hard drives and the inner goings-on with that catagory so could anyone tell me exactly how to go about totally whiping my hard drive? I take it there's some system tool? I'll need to know as I'll be selling this puppy on Ebay most likey (I've decided against selling it to my friend as he can't afford it and I'd feel wrong trying to sell you guys an old beater like this when you can get better for less on newegg). Thanks:)
 
just do a format, not a quick format, just format it to something really weird, or fat from ntfs. that should screw up anything that's on there pretty good.
 
Thanks, will d/l now, what's the point of the random stuff? I'm just going to whipe it and reinstall XP so I can sell it for more $.
 
It does it so it scrambles any possible data left on the drive so its unrecoverable!
There is also a program which does the same and runs off a floppy but i cant remember the name of it!
Hope it works for you.
 
Really Ex theres no need in that unless you have sensitive corporate data really. Most normal people use their PCs to install apps and surf the net. Unless you have anything to hide, boot from your windows xp cd, go to the recovery console and then type:
Code: 
format [driveletter]:
 
First of all if you really want to make the data totally unrecoverable and unreadable a simple format won't work. I once had a Linux formatted disk that I accidentally repartitioned and re-formatted as FAT32. I was able to recover both the partitions and the data using readily-available free tools. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that data uses the simple mathematical model of zeros and ones and that changing a one to a zero hides the earlier data, it's not as simple as that. This post gives a brief technical intro to the issues of hardcore data recovery. Formatting it several times over will increase the entropy on the hard-drive and make the data better protected.

However, if you you really need to protect the data, or are truly paranoid, then you can mount the drive on a Linux box try the following script (assuming the hard-drive you want to wipe is /dev/hdc):

#!/bin/bash
while [1 -eq 1 ]
do
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hdc
done
Click to expand...

That one takes input from the random number generator device and send the output to the hard-drive and keeps doing so until you kill it. Leave that one running for a few weeks and even the NSA will be hard-pressed to recover the data!
 
Okay guys I'm seeing it now. I have nothing to hide so I'll just pop in the XP disk and do it from there. I sort of suspected it has something to do with that but I really didn't know. Thanks everyone.
 
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