Anybody know of any free software that will flip all/most bits on your HDD several times?

2/3/2006 2:55:20 PM

Darik's Boot and Nuke
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

2/3/2006 2:57:25 PM

i wouldn't want to have this on my PC lol
i'd accidentally do it once and then be fucked forever.

2/3/2006 2:57:52 PM

dban doesnt reside on your pc, its on a bootable floppy

2/3/2006 3:01:37 PM

yeah, dban is the shit

2/3/2006 3:30:50 PM

http://www.jetico.com

bcwipe

2/3/2006 3:39:11 PM

^bestcrypt is the hot shit I use it all the time

2/3/2006 3:43:28 PM

i used to use evidence eliminator but now i use windows washer. granted they arent free but still ways around that.

2/3/2006 3:56:43 PM

DBAN all the way. Too easy to use (considering what it does), runs from CD or floppy, works well with multiple drives and you can even customize the write patterns and number of iterations.


BC-Wipe sucks. It only supports drives supported by MS-DOS and doesn't work properly with more than one drive. Basically, if you have anything other than a single vanilla ATA drive it will not work correctly.

2/3/2006 4:06:09 PM

what the fuck do you people have on your hard drives that needs DOD level erasure?

oh wait nevermind

its a bunch of college kids with no regards for the law.

2/3/2006 4:33:13 PM

I was selling some HDDs here at work.

They used to contain patient data.

HIPAA regs require a DOD spec wipe of the drive before it can be sold.

2/3/2006 4:35:11 PM

since I had a lot of credit cards and other financial, not to mention personal journaling on my drive, I want to delete the data more thoroughly than simply deleting the FAT

That means overwriting every bit... The best way to describe a program that overwrites every bit is to ask for DOD level erasure. You are correct that I don't need to flip the bits several times. No one's gonna be looking at my platters with a microscope.

But its easy as shit to recover data that hasn't been overwritten at least once.

2/3/2006 4:46:20 PM

I work for the fed govt.

Hard drives do not leave unless they have been properly sanitized. I found that DBAN works most reliably with a wide range of hardware than other tools do.

[Edited on February 3, 2006 at 4:49 PM. Reason : +]

2/3/2006 4:46:49 PM

and that's when "eraser" comes in

2/3/2006 4:47:44 PM

http://www.killdisk.com

2/3/2006 4:49:34 PM

the guy using evidence eraser probably has kiddy porn on his box

2/3/2006 5:01:50 PM

Quote :

"But its easy as shit to recover data that hasn't been overwritten at least once."

Really? Ok, so I have 250GB hdd and I reformated (not the quick way) reinstalled windows.
Just realized that I forgot to copy a bunch of Matlab files to my external before hand.

So how easy is it to try and recover these?

2/3/2006 6:45:16 PM

i'll do it for a price

2/3/2006 6:46:27 PM

Quote :

" So how easy is it to try and recover these?"

its easy, but tedious.

2/3/2006 8:29:09 PM

eraser will zero-fill up to DoD standards (which i think state 5x zerofill write right now) and it also has an option to do 32x zerofill!!!

2/6/2006 10:34:23 AM

I second (or third, or howevermanyX) dban. Simple, versatile and works well.

2/6/2006 11:28:14 AM

You can get killdisk for free from the NCSU software page. It lets you set the number of passes you want performed, floppy bootable. It'll do the job, and you can't beat free.

2/6/2006 3:39:58 PM

did someone hack the google gibson or did you just forget how to google?

2/6/2006 5:37:29 PM

^ dude, threads like this are what help make google work (ie more usefull stuff instead of crap you don't care about). chill.

2/7/2006 4:00:38 PM

i hate not being able to use the argument that tww isn't google indexed - but crazyj finally gave up on writing a decent search engine i guess

2/7/2006 4:06:44 PM

Quote :

"So how easy is it to try and recover these?"

Look up "PCI File Recovery" and find out for yourself. If the drive is formatted, and then given to a person, its fairly easy. The more stuff that gets written to the drive, the harder it becomes to get it off. This is why they offer 3x overwrite, 5x overwrite and up to 32x overwrite. If a file is overwritten 32 times, good luck recovering it.

[Edited on February 7, 2006 at 5:37 PM. Reason : .]

2/7/2006 5:37:21 PM

and that is why you should just use thermite to destroy the drive

2/7/2006 5:48:09 PM

That's why you should encrypt the drive to begin with

Quote :

"what the fuck do you people have on your hard drives that needs DOD level erasure?"

I do a lot of work under NDA agreements. If someone were to gank an image off my machine while im not here, I'm liable for it. And I sure as fuck don't trust windows security. Not to mention the IP security of my own works.

And the pr0n.

2/7/2006 9:08:20 PM

^^^ Damn that was so easy . I got all my matlab files back
I thought that shit was too hard to recover so I wasn't going to try. Glad I saw this thread.

2/8/2006 2:39:44 PM