Hard Disk Wipe Utility

AHarnish1997

Hello,

Are there any disk utilities that you can recommend that would completely zero-out either a hard drive or floppy drive?

TIA

Andrew

SomeGuy

What vintage of hard drive?

For "modern" stuff, a bootable Linux CD running "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" (make sure you have the right destination device). There is a custom CD called Darik's Boot and Nuke/ DBAN, that does the same thing, but never tried it.

There was also DOS a tool called "HDDErase" that would invoke a "modern" hard drive's firmware secure erase functionality. The idea is that ensures erasure of any bad/spare sectors.

For IDE drives under 127GB, the DOS based MAXLLF formatter does a good job wiping drives.

For MFM/RLL hard drives, use SpeedStor to perform a low level format or destructive media test.

For floppy disks consider a bulk eraser. But note that some other forms of removable media should not be bulk erased as it might render the media unusable.

AHarnish1997

All the drives would be IDE. No MFM. How would I manage to get ahold of HDDErase or MAXLLF?

jonirob

HDDErase 4.0

https://www.hiren.info/downloads/freeware-tools/hdd-erase