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Hard Disk Wipe Utility

AHarnish1997AHarnish1997
in Software
Hello,

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

TIA

Andrew

Comments

  • SomeGuySomeGuy
    edited July 2020
    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.



  • AHarnish1997AHarnish1997
    All the drives would be IDE. No MFM. How would I manage to get ahold of HDDErase or MAXLLF?
  • jonirobjonirob
    HDDErase 4.0

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