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I have been using cCleaner data wipe feature to erase contents on hdds, Now I need boot drive so I use Active @ KillDisk, it has 3 options:

Wipe unused clusters Erase areas of the hard drive that are not formatted and not currently used by the operating system (data has not been recently written there unless this is a recently deleted partition)

Wipe metadata and system files area Erase areas of the disk containing information about previous files on the volume and prevents recovery of files using past records of them

Wipe slack space in file clusters Erase slack space within files. Files are allocated a set amount of space by the OS, in certain increments (depending on the file system). Because files are usually never exactly the size of the space allocated to them, there may be unused space within a file that may contain traces of data. This algorithm wipes this space to remove these data traces.

Wipe unused cluster is marked by default, is this enough? cCleaner has option to set the wipe mode to "entire space".

In DiskKill if I mark all 3 options then it says "FULL Wipe, Slow" which is equivalent to cCleaners wipe mode "Entire Space" I guess.

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  • More than one pass is a waste, I use Western Digital's Data Lifeguard diagnostic tool to zero fill my drives, this guarantee's no data is left behind.
    – Moab
    Jun 23, 2020 at 15:06
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    > Wipe unused cluster is marked by default, is this enough? => This is not very specific. The question is - enough for what? What is the data? Who is the attacker?
    – r2d3
    Jun 23, 2020 at 19:44
  • Moab, you are probably missleading people without even knowing it! :)
    – r2d3
    Jun 23, 2020 at 19:45
  • @r2d3 I mean if it is enough for making personal data unrecoverable, it is company's data, there is no attacker, I need to sold the drives so I need to wipe them first, I'm not sure if I need to wipe metadata/system files plus slack space in file clusters. While I mark all of them, as you can see it says "Full Wipe". I thing this is the same as cCleaner's "Entire Space" wipe option.
    – George G.
    Jun 24, 2020 at 18:05
  • I do not understand whether your data is personal data or company data when reading your sentence. "Personal data" is not an adequate answer. Is it video, audio, pictures, excel files or txt files? Getting hold of a sector full of bytes of a video will not necessary help an attacker.
    – r2d3
    Jun 24, 2020 at 18:30

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As disclosed by the information dripping from your comments, your solution of deletion is not suitable for your situation.

When selling a hard drive assuming there is no data to be transfered to the buyer the recommended way is to completely delete the drive.

Your solution of somehow deleting within an file system is rather error-prone and less reliable.

The proposal of Moab is misleading as his recommended tool does not completely delete the drive in question - try it out!

There are lots of additional aspects to discuss about deletion. To make it simple I recommend you running a

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

command from a live Linux system running from a USB stick.

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