A Utility to Clear aHard Drive ??

**Razor** · January 22nd, 2015, 02:04 PM

I have a friend that has a PC that he wishes to dispose of, but wants to clean the hard drive first. Is there any kind of a program that I could put on a thumb drive to loan to him so that he can remove any important stuff ? I am not sure if the OS is winxp or win7. Thanks for your time .....

**Midknyte** · January 22nd, 2015, 02:39 PM

DBAN. It's on UBCD5 also.
http://www.dban.org/

You can check out other options in this article (DBAN is one of them):
http://gizmodo.com/5489933/leave-no-...d-thumb-drives

**Razor** · January 22nd, 2015, 03:07 PM

These programs always seem to want to install a Download Manager. Is this a safe way to do so ?

**Midknyte** · January 22nd, 2015, 03:21 PM

I don't install download managers. Which app are you trying to download? What browser are you using?

UBCD5 has DBAN, plus a lot of other things like hard drive and memory diags.

**fink** · January 22nd, 2015, 03:29 PM

When you say "dispose" do you mean he's throwing it away or recycling it? Or is he giving or selling it to be used?

If it's never being used again he can remove the hard drive and use it as a backup drive in a newer computer.

Alternately he could take the hard drive out and hit it hard with a hammer a few times. That's a lot faster than wiping a hard drive with data which can take hours. (always wear safety glasses when doing things like that)

**Midknyte** · January 22nd, 2015, 03:31 PM

Originally Posted by fink

Alternately he could take the hard drive out and hit it hard with a hammer a few times. That's a lot faster than wiping a hard drive with data which can take hours.

Hah! That is very true. Plus way more fun.

**Razor** · January 22nd, 2015, 03:42 PM

Ok guys, guess I have to level with you. He is going to give the tower to me, providing he can get rid of his personal. I offered to remove the drive, but then I got to thinking... maybe I could use the HD myself....The tower is one of those mini things & as most, the HD is hidden down at the bottom under cdrom.............

**Midknyte** · January 22nd, 2015, 03:46 PM

Ah. If that's the case, I would get UBCD5. I've probably mentioned it to you in other threads.

Run a hard drive diag to make sure the drive is still good. If it passes, you can run DBAN. If not, hammer time.

As fink mentioned, it could take several hours to erase the drive.

**Razor** · January 22nd, 2015, 03:58 PM

Thanks Midknyte; I'll see how it goes.. Gonna go see him now ......

**Train** · January 22nd, 2015, 08:47 PM

DBAN - default 3 passes
SATA 1TB hdd
22 hours it what it took.
CPU was a Intel Core2 Duo E6750

Might want to replace that hdd with a 240GB SSD.

**glussier** · January 24th, 2015, 12:52 PM

The chances that the drives fall in hands of somebody with enough knowledge to restore data on, even, a 1 pass zero fill, are close to none. If would just do an install of the o/s on a reformatted drive and then use cleaner to do a 1 pass zero fill on the remainder of the drive.

**Welshjim** · January 25th, 2015, 03:24 PM

If you want to do this on your own PC how does DBAN allow you keep the Operating System while wiping everything else? Like for giving the PC to a family member.

**Train** · January 25th, 2015, 04:29 PM

DBAN wipes everything off the hdd. actually it overwrites the drive so,
The HDD ends up just like it came from the factory.

**Welshjim** · January 25th, 2015, 05:53 PM

Train--
Thanks.

**Train** · January 25th, 2015, 06:13 PM

Originally Posted by Welshjim

Train--
Thanks.

You are welcome. Back in the 98 days, folks would have called it a low level format, which of coarse it was not.

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