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Securely format a hard drive

I need to wipe my HDD before selling the PC. What is the best tool for it? It also would be great if it could run by booting from CD or Flash drive

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closed as exact duplicate by Troggy♦, John T, alex, Diago Dec 5 '09 at 6:21

This question covers exactly the same ground as earlier questions on this topic; its answers may be merged with another identical question. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.

4 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot disk that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers.

DBAN prevents or thoroughly hinders all known techniques of hard disk forensic analysis.

DBAN is free and open source software.

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up vote 1 down vote

One can use the Linux dd command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1M

if you know what your doing... especially if you have other disks on the machine with data you want to keep on them. Make sure to get the right disk (the /dev/hda part). That being said, it's not all that hard to grab a Linux LiveCD (DSL is under 50 MB) and type it into a terminal. See also this thread at LinuxQuestions.org.

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In addition, you left out the count parameter as well which needs to be accurate, by doing a df -h to get the number of Gigabytes, divide that by the blocksize (bs) to get the figure required by count. It would be even better if you do it in varying block sizes for at least 7 times to thoroughly remove any last bits of data. Maybe start at blocksize 2048, next iteration, 1024, next iteration 512 and so on. – t0mm13b Dec 5 '09 at 0:28
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up vote 0 down vote

KillDisk Free has always done the trick for me.

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up vote 0 down vote

The most secure wiper is fire ;)

But if you use ANY tool that overwrites it lots of time (33 times is the most I've seen, called Guttman IIRC) then there's no way to recover anything even with government technology.

Also, it's very expensive to recover data. Something like $300 per GB here where I live, and up to 7 re-writes at most.

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i suggested Thermite elsewhere, but i think this disk is meant to be used again. :) – Molly7244 Dec 4 '09 at 22:05
You can buy some seriously rugged hard drives, I wouldn't have fire as an absolute :P Thermite, yes. But only for now! – Phoshi Dec 4 '09 at 23:22
A small cup of thermite can melt through the engine block of a car...I somehow doubt even the most rugged of HDDs could ever stand up to it – davr Dec 4 '09 at 23:38
Thermite? But I mean opening the HDD and putting the discs on fire. Is it even possible to read anything after a while on fire? I mean, the disc would distort enough as not being readable at least, right? Maybe the government could restore that tho =P – Camilo Martin Dec 9 '09 at 22:37
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